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“You can’t get pregnant if your boyfriend’s been drinking Mountain Dew,” one student said to another.
I couldn’t help myself, “I’m sorry, what?”
The girl turned and looked over her shoulder at me, unembarrassed, “Yeah, you’ve never heard that?”
“You know that’s not true, right?” I looked between her and her classmate. I was met with blank stares. “And did you know you can get pregnant if you have sex on your period?”
“Ew! Ms. DeMarco!” The girls giggled and exchanged glances.
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“Well, I’m never having sex before I’m ready,” a third girl chimed in. “Ever since reading that book where that girl doesn’t even know she’s pregnant and then throws her baby in the trash, I’m waiting.”
That moment stuck with me because it pointed to something I’d been circling for years as both a teacher and a librarian: the adults in that first student’s life had not given her the language or information she needed. And neither, in any official capacity, had the school, but reading a fictional account of real heartbreak informed another student’s personal decisions. The book she was referring to was After by Amy Efaw.
Here’s why that’s not surprising. In the United States, there is no federal standard for sex education. What gets taught — and whether anything gets taught at all — is decided state by state, district by district, sometimes school by school. The result is a patchwork so uneven that two teenagers living 20 miles apart might receive completely different educations about their own bodies, their own boundaries, and what a healthy relationship is supposed to feel like.
In the Commonwealth of Virginia, Family Life Education — the state’s umbrella term for sex ed — is not even mandatory. Districts can opt out entirely. When it is taught, state law requires that abstinence be presented as the expected standard, with emphasis on “the benefits and value of marriage” and “the value of postponing sexual activity.” Consent appears in the curriculum framework, but as permissive language rather than a requirement: schools may include it. Dating violence gets a firmer mandate — at least once in middle school, at least twice in high school — but the emotional literacy underneath that mandate, including the skills that might help a teenager recognize a red flag before it escalates to violence, is largely absent. There is nothing in the required curriculum about communication. Nothing about what it looks like when someone respects your boundaries versus slowly dismantles them. Nothing about the difference between jealousy and love.
Virginia is not uniquely bad at this. Nationally, only nine states require instruction on consent, and just 27 require any instruction on healthy relationships at all. Oregon, frequently cited as a leader in this space, begins teaching about personal boundaries in kindergarten and frames consent as a communicative skill students build over time. Washington state enacted legislation explicitly requiring instruction in affirmative consent. These states are the exception, and even they are working within the limits of what a classroom — with its mandatory attendance, its grades, its relationship to parents who can opt their kids out — can realistically accomplish.
Which brings me back to the library.
What teenagers are getting in the absence of formal instruction is fiction. Or they’re getting it from the internet, where the algorithm is under no obligation to show them anything accurate, healthy, or remotely useful. Specifically, a lot of them are getting YA romance — a genre that, at its best, is doing quietly radical work. Not because every YA love story is a model of healthy dynamics (it is very much not), but because the genre has been wrestling seriously with these questions for longer than most curricula have, and some of it is getting it exactly right.
The cautionary examples are worth naming first, because they’re part of the conversation too. Twilight remains the most famous case study in romantic obsession dressed up as devotion — a controlling, surveillance-heavy relationship that an entire generation absorbed as the gold standard of being loved. It is not a villain; it is a useful text. But it needs the critical frame that most readers, especially young ones, don’t automatically bring to it. Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland is what that frame looks like in practice: a novel that follows a teen girl through an abusive relationship with unflinching specificity, refusing to let the reader mistake the cycle for passion. Alex Flinn’s Breathing Underwater does something equally useful by putting readers inside the head of the abusive boyfriend himself, making the mechanics of control visible in a way that is genuinely hard to look away from.
More recently, the genre has gotten good at showing what healthy actually looks like — not as a lesson plan, but as a love story. Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High gives us a romance that moves at the pace of trust, built around a protagonist whose responsibilities and boundaries are treated as features of who she is rather than obstacles her love interest needs to overcome. Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star keeps Daniel’s pursuit of Natasha tethered to her actual interest and consent rather than romanticizing persistence. Mariko Tamaki’s graphic novel Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me makes the whole architecture visible: what it looks like to keep returning to a relationship that’s wrong for you, and what it takes to choose the one that’s right. And Leah Johnson’s You Should See Me in a Crown — joyful and specific and unambiguous in its sapphic love story — models a first romance built on friendship and honesty rather than intensity and possession.
These books are doing what the Virginia Family Life Education curriculum is not: teaching teenagers that love is something you participate in and not something that happens to you. That how someone treats you when they’re angry tells you something. That wanting someone to change for you is different from accepting them. That you are allowed to say no, and that a person who loves you will hear it.
I want to be honest about the limits of this argument. Fiction is not a replacement for comprehensive sex education, and handing a teenager Dreamland is not the same as handing her a health teacher who will answer her questions without embarrassment or judgment. The genre also contains plenty of titles that do the opposite of what I’m describing — that glamorize possessiveness, that frame jealousy as proof of feeling, that let readers absorb lessons about relationships that no good curriculum would endorse. Putting the right book in the right hands requires a librarian who has read it, which is a resource not every school has.
But here is what I know from standing at a circulation desk and watching what teenagers reach for: they are hungry for this. They are looking, in the pages of novels, for some model of what it could feel like to be treated well — or some confirmation of what it looks like when they aren’t. The least we can do is make sure the books are there, and that someone who has read them is standing nearby.
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