Thinking of my childhood often brings back the same picture: my grandma, mum and I rushing to the TV screen as we hear the words “Televisa presenta.” The announcement would air at 5 p.m., five days a week, signaling the start of our favorite telenovela. The intro song followed and I’d murmur Spanish words, engrossed in the images of unrealistically beautiful people meeting, fighting and reconciling. In parallel, I would imagine myself as one of the characters, passionately kissing the protagonist — or the classmate I was crushing on at the time. The show would make my deepest wishes palpable, at least for an hour, helping me and many of my fellow Serbians escape our gloomy postwar reality. I grew up cocooned in a telenovela culture, and it took many years to realize how much my immersion in it reality affected my views on love, gender and family.

Telenovelas have been around for more than 60 years now. They have their roots in Latin America, where they were introduced as screen adaptations of novels, and later developed into a distinct and influential genre. Even the most recent shows do not differ greatly from the plots of Mexican melodramas of the ’50s: a couple falls in love and faces diverse obstacles, but despite all the disputes they get married, usually in the last episode. Realizing that the protagonist's lover is actually her long lost relative is an everyday occurrence in telenovelas. For me, the plot of Star Wars was predictable, because Mexican soap operas live off of moments like "Luke, I am your father.” Such complications are widespread, but the one that almost every telenovela is based on is social mobility. The romance on which the plot is centered is initially impossible because of class, religious or racial differences. In postwar Serbia, climbing up the social ladder in the easiest way possible was a common dream, a dream that explains the enormous success of telenovelas in the late ’90s. What is it, though, that makes these shows so relatable, even 20 years later?

Telenovelas are TV shows that forge a strong relationship with their audience. They invite their viewers to identify themselves with the protagonists and imagine a person they wish to be. The structure of a Mexican telenovela is almost magical; it alludes to our subconscious desires and fears, blending the fictional with the real. My grandma, deeply unsatisfied with her marriage, would always support a woman oppressed by her husband, making comments like, “She is staying for the kids, but I think she should think of herself! Who will put her first if she does not?” It took me a lot of growing up to realize that it was not about Maria or Lucia or whatever the name of the character was — it was about grandma and what she wanted to do, but did not have the courage to.

Because of this personal connection to their audience, telenovelas have an incredible potential to initiate social change. In many countries, these shows managed to shift the public opinion and behavior on issues such as organ donation, interfaith marriage and contraception. One of the best examples comes from Brazil, where the fictional soap opera family was significantly smaller than an average local household. Researchers then observed that regions that had access to the soap opera correlated with lower birth rates after the show was completed. The importance of telenovelas to Balkan society was recognized in the summer of 1997 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Given the postwar poverty, the local TV station had no money to buy a licence for the Venezuelan show Kassandra and aired it illegally. When the channel stopped broadcasting the telenovela, people started protesting, and ultimately the Bosnian embassy in Venezuela had to intervene and ask the representatives to give them the remaining episodes as a gift. As the producers of the show realized that the Bosnians were using the show as a form of collective therapy, they agreed.

But the same telenovela caused major problems, mostly stemming from the fact that some in the Balkans mistook it for reality. Coraima Torres, the lead actress, was almost murdered during a visit to Bosnia, where a fan attacked her. He claims that he wanted to “liberate Kassandra from all her pain and suffering.” In a small Serbian village, on the other hand, the inhabitants hired a lawyer to represent Kassandra (the character), who was accused of murder (a fictional murder in a fictional show). The people of the Balkans are not the only ones who do not know how to draw the line between real life and the world depicted in telenovelas. In Venezuela, women protested on the streets when the plot centered on a husband who cheated on his wife.

The wider social effects of telenovelas were always clear to me, but I naively overlooked their influence on my personal relationships. These shows not only increase our expectations of romantic relationships but also promote childish and unyielding styles of communication. Major fights and differences tend to end in passionate love making, after which the problems magically disappear. The characters rarely take responsibility for their words and actions and are easily forgiven for manipulating and lying to others. It is simplistic to assume that we learn such behavior from watching TV, but it is indisputable that ten years of watching similar scenarios on a daily basis at least partially influences our perception of what shapes a relationship. Ten years after losing my telenovela virginity, I find myself in impossible relationships that make me all the more excited by how impossible they are. But reality is nothing like telenovelas: if you manipulate other people, they get hurt.

Eventually, my relationship with telenovelas suits the genre: it’s a love-hate one. I will always feel nostalgic about the times when my grandma, mum and I made up a choreography to one of the our favorite telenovela songs, Quien es ese hombre. At one point, even my grandpa joined in, making my granny smile. Watching telenovelas brought our family closer and commenting on the characters made me understand my relatives’ opinions better. I still remember, though, how much I hated the simple, stereotypical characters played by stunning women. In telenovelas, female characters tend to be either completely naive and perfect, or viciously evil. Independent women are vilified, while the simple, passive ones are rewarded with a happy ending. This is why, secretly, I would hope for the evil ones to win. Remember that narrative transformation that telenovelas initiate? Well, I couldn’t and didn’t want to be like the good protagonists. According to telenovelas, girls like me don’t get a happy ending — but I refuse to believe that that is so. In my own, less dramatic version of life, I will get a spectacular last episode.

Last week, a comment from a friend took me by surprise, “Carlos, I didn’t recognize you. You look like someone straight out of a telenovela.” I did not know how to take the comment. I have recently grown my beard and, as I often do, wore a formal shirt that revealed my chest. I started to wonder whether I actually did look like a telenovela character. The truth is, male telenovela characters do tend to have the aforementioned characteristics, alongside being generally attractive. I don’t consider myself as attractive as your average telenovela character, so I took that as a compliment.

My relationship with telenovelas goes all the way back to when I was four years old and my parents would not come back from work until 9:30 or 10 p.m. Before I got involved in swimming, I would spend most of my afternoons and evenings with my maids, watching Mexican telenovelas. In those shows, I still remember all the love, betrayal, passion and, most of all, the happy endings. My dad would get extremely upset whenever he found me with the maid watching telenovelas. He would say, “¡Put…, Carlos! I have no problem with them watching telenovelas, but you shouldn’t be watching that garbage.” Back then, I couldn’t care less about what my father thought, so I would always be in front of my TV, watching show after show. I simply enjoyed, and still enjoy, watching telenovelas.

Back in my childhood days, there would even be telenovelas targeted at children. Televisa, one of Mexico and Latin America’s largest television channels, had a section called Televisa Niños that would produce telenovelas for kids just like the six-year-old me — Cómplices al Rescate, Alegrijes y Rebujos, ¡Vivan los Niños! and De Pocas, Pocas Pulgas are just some that I can recall. In retrospect, I find it ridiculous, or at least irresponsible, that they produced telenovelas for children. One cannot expect children to be able to distinguish the difference between reality and fiction. In these telenovelas, kids would do crazy things for each other’s love. If you don’t believe me, watch this trailer. The first time I told a girl that I liked her was in first grade, and I tried to do it as they did it in telenovelas. It was a terrible mistake — but at least I learned that life is not like television.

In the paper Places, Faces, and Other Familiar Things: The Cultural Experience of Telenovela Viewing among Latinos in the United States, Barrera et. al try to explain why Latinos who reside in the United States are so avid about telenovelas. According to the authors, Latinos in the U.S. watch telenovelas because these shows recreate Latin American culture. Thus, through this cultural recreation, Latino immigrants are able to stay close to their roots despite the distance from home. There is no doubt that telenovelas provide a representation of Latino culture. Religion, family, relationships and love are always at the core of these stories. However, I think that telenovelas skew Latin American reality and therefore the behavior of Latinos.

To be honest, I was not aware of other people’s perceptions of Latinos until my study abroad in Norway. I remember someone once telling me, “Latinos in real life are just like the characters we see in movies or television shows. They are caring, loving, religious, full of themselves, melodramatic, attractive and cheesy.” Back in El Salvador I did not consider myself having any of these characteristics. Okay, maybe religious, caring and loving, but not at stereotypical levels.

That changed over time because I noticed that the Latinos at my boarding school did tend to embrace all the characteristics my friend had mentioned. At one point I even questioned my own Latino-ness, so I decided to embrace the Latino stereotype — I thought that people were expecting me to behave that way anyway. I felt like I was surrendering to people’s expectations, which I really did not mind. At first it felt weird, since I had never really behaved in such an exaggerated way; but later I felt comfortable with the new me. This new me resembled the television characters 100%. I became more full of myself. Never in my life did I think that I would feel so comfortable with my body or imagine that I would be shirtless in most of my Facebook profile pictures. I became cheesier and cheesier to a point that it surprised even me. Just like telenovela characters, I would make very public love declarations — I once wrote on my ex-girlfriend’s Facebook page:

And above all, I became more melodramatic. I became more conscious of the feelings I have, and to some extent I have let them take control over my rational way of thinking. There are many times when I think with my heart and not with my head.

Do I regret embracing the Latino stereotype that people see in telenovelas? I have not been able to make that assessment yet. Perhaps I have always been this way and I just repressed it at home. I do know that at times it has not been wise to be cheesy, melodramatic or full of myself. For better or for worse, that is who I am at the moment, and I am fine with it. Just like in telenovelas, I fall in love passionately. Just like in telenovelas, I feel extremely heartbroken after a breakup. Just like in telenovelas, I will try to make things last, and fight until the very end. Just like in telenovelas, family, friends and religion are an important part of my life. Just like in telenovelas, I want to have a happy ending and love someone with all my heart. Will it happen? Who knows? Only time will tell. All I know is that life is not a telenovela, Latinos are not exactly like telenovela characters, and any similarities to actual persons or places, alive or dead, real or fictitious are merely coincidental and the product of a feverish imagination.