Some common experiences come to us later in life. Netflix’s Young Royals has inexplicably allowed me to remember and appreciate a kind of love I don’t have access to and never did. In a nutshell, the story centers around two 16-year-old boys, Wille and Simon, who attend the same posh boarding school, Hillerska. As a prince of Sweden, attending Hillerska is Wille’s birthright. For Simon, being at Hillerska is exceptional, both as a sign of excellence as well as a rare phenomenon. Wille is, ostensibly, an avatar for history and tradition while Simon is a representation of merit and progress.

Wille and Simon fall in love, and we are treated to a refashioning of the Cinderella story, though one that focuses more on the prince than the commoner. Like many fictions rooted in social reality, Wille and Simon’s love story dramatizes the question of whether tradition and modernity can coexist, whether radically disparate social actors can come together and be in a society together.

This is not new.

Nor is the nod to a Romantic sensibility (Wille  first notices Simon through his singing, a talent and sensibility that reveal the worth of both characters: Simon because he can produce such beauty and Wille because he can not only hear the beauty but sense the truth beyond). The gay Latin American immigrant navigating a world in which being a “scholarship boy” marks him as mundane yet exotic–also not new. By all rights, this show should not be able to pull me vertiginously into its world. Its predictability, it’s not, it shouldn’t be, enough to overcome my (literally) studied readerly detachment. Yet how love manifests in the story: I cannot look away-and I cannot help but to feel.

***

Like other teenage romances strewn about the cultural landscape, Young Royals treads familiar territory: the discovery of, and self-recognition in, same-gender desire. Boy meets (gay) boy. Boy wants to be constantly around (gay) boy. (Gay) boy kisses boy. Secrets and chaos ensue. Leading to the question: what’s more important, a shared love or the preservation of a self-image that is spectral at best? But, Wille isn’t about specters; he’s about making desire concrete, tangible. He’s all in for love.

Perhaps the nostalgia of (imagined) teenage love is commonplace, and evoking this experience is exactly why there are so many shows focused on teenagers. They remind us of who we used to be…or, perhaps, they remind non-queer people of who they used to be. Experiencing the second-order yet intense love in Young Royals has made me question what I have been feeling (have I been feeling?) all this time watching love stories about non-queer people. Have these experiences with stories been purely intellectual, the emotions manufactured from cognition and not emerging from randomly firing synapses, tight chests, flop sweats, dry mouths, burning cheeks, stomach knots? Watching non-queer stories all my life, I have been happy for the characters, perhaps utterly and hopelessly empathizing. Understanding pleasure rather than feeling it alongside them (but, are we supposed to feel love alongside characters that have created not love itself but its aura?). Instead of approximating feeling, when I’m watching Young Royals, I feel love. It is a love that knows itself and also recognizes itself on the screen.

***

I find it scandalous. That no other story–and I have devoured thousands–has felt so real and so true, even when its plot generates admittedly self-indulgent melodramatic shifts, a structure that usually titillates. But also scandalous that the princeling character, Wille, is conveying a possibility of emotional honesty, and acting from that honesty sincerely, that feels, to use his language, normal.

A “normal life” is Wille’s starting proposition, one that seems achievable when he is first the spare prince but unlikely after he becomes Crown Prince and future king. That doesn’t seem so striking: rich little boys and rich little girls always seem to want to be “like everyone else”–at least in movies. What is novel is that “normal life” seems quietly radical: it includes, it delights in loving another boy, it generates possibilities. Here, “normal life” is as radical as it is privileged. Privileged because Wille can dream it; as a prince, he is free to want, to desire with a reasonable expectation of having that desire satisfied. Radical because same-gender love used to be considered aberrant, and now, in this make-believe Swedish world, it’s as common or, rather, rare as any other love.

For Wille, a “normal life” means surrendering to, embracing same-gender love. A surrender to the recognition of intimacy, embracing a desire he didn’t know existed. A life in which shifting into and accepting same-gender desire does not require a realization, claiming a coherent, cogent identity. Instead, here same-gender love seems automatic, instinctual, logical and also pedestrian, commonplace, a variety of love you can grab onto, pursue, enjoy. It is an affirmation, not an uncontainable negation of the social order, of tradition.

Wille’s “normal life” was not possible when I was his age, 16, and it is a life I would have scoffed at even 20 years ago. And, yet, it’s the normal life I currently live. Because make no mistake. I’m very much living Wille’s dream of a normal life—a fact I did not realize until deep into the show’s second season.

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Wille’s ability to more or less freely pursue Simon, the immigrant gay boy breaking into an elite private school environment, shows how self-consciously the question of class and privilege surface in the story, not the least because Wille is a prince. Being a prince allows him to claim what he wants on his own terms, a gift that brings him to Simon as well as a curse that causes Simon to back away from him. Nevertheless, it is a privilege, especially because Simon could never exercise his will like Wille can. Simon is very much a confirmed gay boy, a claim to identity that is both limiting and powerful. Wille’s freedom is much more capacious. Because what he does, which makes this story distinct from other gay teenage dramas, is discover and act on same-gender desire without having to lay claim to any identity. It doesn’t even seem like Wille thinks about sexual identity (as opposed to having to repeatedly confront what’s expected of him as Crown Prince because of his same-gender relationship). His love is rhizomatic, present, unselfconscious, liberatory, not requiring articulation only action.

A part of me wishes for Wille to have a grander dream than a normal life–what that dream would be, I don’t know. I don’t know what a “grand dream” would be for me, even now in Middle Age. But, there has to be room for grand dreams and commonplace ones, room for when grand dreams become small and small ones become grand. And, I can’t help but dream and live this little, impossible dream with Wille. 

Wille bypasses the mystery of sexual identity. Instead, his task is to resolve whether he will be king or not, how his individuality can fit or not within the institution of the monarchy, or how the institution of the monarchy can adapt to include his whole self. Wille is wrestling with whether he wants to be king or not, not with his sexual identity; the ground upon which he’s wrestling is his steadfast love for Simon. The fact that Simon is a boy is relevant only insofar as it raises the stakes of the story, but at the core, Young Royals is about whether Wille, or any teenager, should prioritize their individuality over their community or whether he should prioritize his duties and responsibilities over his individual desires and wishes.

The way through that labyrinth is what you do and why you do it, not by claiming an identity. Know thyself is moot. Act thyself is king.

***

This way of proceeding, this way of being in the world, I could not have imagined when I was 16, though I suspect that at least some non-queer teenagers could and did. So, why does this feel emotionally true and honest, not with me at 47 but with the trace of my 16-year-old self within me?

In 1991, the X-Men’s Jean Grey became a telepath. Again. Attacked by a telepathic mutant whose powers turn his victim’s psyches to their former child self, Jean becomes  a little girl again and relives the traumatic experience that originally catalyzed her psychic powers: holding her best friend as she dies after being struck by a car, a death she experiences telepathically. The images suggest that the villain is overcome by the explosive re-emergence of telepathy, and over the course of several issues, it becomes clear that Jean has fully regained her telepathy. She goes back to move forward.

Young Royals is acting upon me in much the same way: evoking my 16-year-old self  and, in that way, summoning, dare I say it, a potentially unconditional love. I have no other analogy but the regression and restoration of a telepathic mutant to describe what it feels like for me to experience that teenage love, to know how poignant and sweet it is, it could have been. The experience is that strange, so unimaginable that I can only make sense of it through a superhero comic. My 16-year-old echo knows that this love depicted in a Swedish teenage drama is not real. Instead, he recognizes a cultural fantasy reflected back at him, one that feels properly romantic, properly about and for him, properly representative.

Upon my return to my self in Middle Age, I find that I can still feel what my 16-year-old incarnation feels, feel what Wille feels—and recognize that I have what Wille wants. I live every day the grand dream my 16-year-old self didn’t know how to dream, the grand dream a fictional character is now teaching my 16-year-old self to dream—and through him, me.

Experiencing this story, regressing to a former self when love could be all consuming, yes, but also…sincere and earnest, this experience has awakened that kind of love in me again. It doesn’t feel wild or erratic, as a teen might feel it, but rather as an electric charge, turning a circuit back on you didn’t know existed, a circuit you had buried deep underground because the potency, the brilliance of its charge also anticipates its inevitable diminution, its guaranteed loss. But, when the anticipation of loss is contained, contained in Middle Age, this electric charge makes colors a little brighter, touch a little softer, taste a little sweeter. It’s teaching me how to love more honestly, without fear of being judged—primarily by myself, love more inexorably.

This shift has not gone unnoticed. Animated by an unselfconscious paranoia, I have been asked if I had done something I was making amends for. My only response was, is: I just want to love you freely, like the Crown Prince of Sweden.

–Dedicated to MBW, who didn’t know what he was getting himself into–then and now.