Who is Y/N? Or instead what is Y/N? Well, Y/N is you, Y/N is me, Y/N is anyone reading this really. It has been a hot minute since I’ve dived into good old fanfiction, but it amazes me that all these years later, I still interpret ‘Y/N’ as ‘Sanjana’, which is my name. Y/N is an abbreviation that was first coined nearly ten years ago and was used primarily by users of Wattpad, Tumblr and Twitter. It essentially stands for ‘Your Name’ and it allows readers of fanfictions to insert themselves into fairytales where their favourite One Direction member and themselves are the protagonists. Or at least, that was what it was for me during my teens. Being able to vicariously live through a book where Harry Styles professes something along the lines of ‘Y/N you are the only one for me’ was something that made me and the millions of other Wattpad users deliriously ecstatic.
Now, for those of you who were never involved in the wonderful world of fanfiction, at this point, you may be asking, what is Wattpad? Wattpad is an online platform that was set up in 2006. It is a platform where anyone can read as well as write original stories. It is highly unlikely that you have not come across work by authors that first started on Wattpad. Wattpad may seem like a lame, immature, fantasy escape. But over the past few years, it has propelled many of its authors into fame. In fact, it has facilitated more than a hundred book deals, and dozens of television and movie licensing deals internationally for original stories that debuted on its platform. Netflix’s hit ‘The Kissing Booth’ had its humble beginnings on Wattpad where it amassed 19 million reads on the platform. This was before its author, Becky Reekles, signed a three-book deal with Random House UK in 2013. To shed further light on the size and impact that Wattpad has, the most-read book on Wattpad is a Harry Styles fanfiction that at the time of writing this piece, has 2 BILLION reads.
If I were to coin a term for my teens, ‘Wattpad era’ would be one of them. Often, one could find me hiding my tiny iPod touch under my bed covers to read the latest chapter of one of the numerous books on the platform. Recently I received a meme which stated how Wattpad gave my generation of young adults “bad kinks”. While it was coming from a playful point of view, it got me thinking about how the meme actually had some truth to it. Being a teen in the 2010s was anomalous. It was the start of the era that was hugely impacted by YouTubers. With the internet at the tips of my finger, I could see how my society was disparate from the ones I saw in vlogs of people my age from Western societies. With “couple goals” videos making the rounds, the idea of love and being in a relationship was something that made a hopeless romantic like me increasingly curious. As a teen who grew up in a fairly conservative country like India where talking to a person of another gender, let alone dating, was still very stigmatised, I only ever had books or movies of the romcom genre to explore things like this. To add on to that, Wattpad gave additional access to teenage users like me to intense romantic sagas on their platform that had readers swooning. What made these stories different from books and movies from mainstream media was perhaps that teens themselves wrote these stories and that gave teen readers a level of relatability that they could never get anywhere else.
Eventually, everything I knew about love, sexual intimacy and all the stages of a relationship came largely from the romance section on Wattpad. I never realised it at the time, but my education in love was now an exceptionally ideal and romanticised version of reality. I had set myself up for disappointment. For instance, I thought meeting my significant other would be a very natural and very organic process. I was sure I’d have my meet-cute—perhaps not at the library like I’d imagined it would—but I’d have it nevertheless. I’m now here to confirm that this has not happened to me in my 23 years. Did I ever read a story where people fall in love with someone they met on a dating app after swiping for hours and going on dozens of awkward dates? Nope.
When I hit the age of twenty, it was the first time I had thoughts of how I was perhaps too late in the dating game. The characters in the Wattpad books were getting married by the time they were my age. Meanwhile, I had never been on a date, I had not had my first kiss yet, and I had never been in a relationship. It was then that I first started questioning myself and the person I am. Was there something wrong with me? Am I not attractive enough? I was surrounded by people I love and who loved me. I had gotten into the university of my dreams, majoring in my favourite subject and was on a path to eventually pursue a career in my dream job. Yet, there I was rooting myself in immense self-doubt.
I eventually “took matters into my own hands” and put myself out on dating apps and to put it lightly, it was a shock to the system. I am an introvert, so social interactions do not come easy to me. Still, I was talking to numerous strangers, having fleeting conversations. It ended up being a vicious cycle of endless swipes, small talk and awkward dates. A feeling I never thought I would associate with looking for love is exhaustion. When you’re on the apps long enough, you start to normalise things like ghosting and swiping left on someone because you think they’re “out of your league”. Your boundaries start to blur and you let some of the red flags slide in hopes of finding “the one”. When I did end up having my first kiss on a date with someone I met from the apps, I didn’t feel a single butterfly that Wattpad said would debilitate me. A fictional character on Wattpad gave me butterflies but a person physically in front of me didn’t? I was so confused. I even found myself giving into the “something casual” aspect of dating, when I knew in the back of my mind that that wasn’t for me. In retrospect, it was perhaps in search of looking for anything that would make me feel remotely as excited as the Wattpad books did. Overall, it was not easy being a hopeless Wattpad generation romantic on dating apps.
I wonder if the Wattpad stories had shown me a more realistic view of dating, would I have been more prepared to take it on? But I suppose Wattpad wouldn’t enjoy the success it does today had that been the case. A more truthful, reality-strewn romance doesn’t particularly fly off the shelves. While I was accepting of learning a lot of these realities the hard way, it made me wonder about others who have gone through a similar process of learning and more importantly, unlearning things the romance section taught us. I fear that if we continue to look for the experiences that the books showed us, they might get in the way of us actually finding happiness. While it was one thing to compare the butterfly-giving experiences in real life, the underlying self-doubt that the Wattpad books instilled in me shouldn’t be ignored. It is already harder now than ever for teens to learn to love themselves while comparing themselves to people online. This added layer of self-doubt that actually comes from a place we go to escape reality, in the end, is perhaps more harmful to us than we realise.
It hit me that even while having the means to become Y/N, being Y/N was not one bit like how I’d imagined it to be. First times will not make me combust into fireworks at a party. My dates cannot read my mind and know what I want unless I explicitly communicate. When my Wattpad reality didn’t come along, I now see I tried to write it myself. I tried to find the story and somewhere along the way it got in the way of me embracing myself and loving myself. Do I still want love? Yes. I want to love and be loved. The harsh realities of dating have not put me off just yet, if anything, it’s made me embrace what I’m looking for and not be afraid to admit it. I want the words of affirmation, the sharing of Spotify playlists and more, it’s just who I am. However, you will no longer find me comparing real life to the Wattpad books and going after capturing the butterflies. I’m learning to enjoy the mundanity of daily life. The absence of a seat-edging love saga doesn’t make it any less thrilling. Will I continue to look for love? Yes, but now with the understanding of not selling myself short and not holding every experience I have to a skewed version of reality that I had come to build. I will continue to turn the page in my Wattpad unreality.
(That being said, if I were to go back in time to reread some of the fanfiction like it was the first, and feel the butterflies for the first time all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat.)