For the uninitiated, here is my summary of The Kissing Booth trilogy:

High-school girl falls in love with her best friend’s brother. Teen-drama and Netflix-comedy ensue.

My problem with The Kissing Booth 3 is the ending. Realising that all her young-adult life she had thought only of what her boyfriend, Noah, and best friend, Lee, had wanted, Elle finally decides to put herself first. She decides to go her own way, leaving her friends to go theirs.

What The Kissing Booth 3 does well is to capture how important it feels for teenagers to have proximity to their friends. Physical distance, although not an insurmountable barrier thanks to social media, represents an irreparable schism not just between friends but between things as they are and things as they will be. ‘The Kissing Booth’ uses melodrama and ham-acting to invoke in the viewer a sense of the calamity that the end of high school once represented for many.

Unfortunately, the illusion is broken when, at the very end of the film, we cut to a “5 years later” epilogue that shows the whole gang reunited and, importantly, hints that Noah and Elle rekindle their romance. My qualm with the epilogue is that, hitherto, the movie does a good job of assuring the viewer that it is not uncommon to view the end of high school as the crossroads of destiny—it is nothing to be embarrassed by—but that it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. The Kissing Booth 3 also almost does a good job of showing how one ought to leave people well—without callous indifference on the one hand, and without platitudes of “until we see again” on the other... that is, until the epilogue showed that Noah and Elle could find each other again. That, although they had grown, they had never grown apart.

The tropes of the genre are suitably adhered to, but at a cost. For a tantalising moment, there was a possibility that the film would just end without having a coda on the romantic plot line. To not include the epilogue may feel like too abrupt an ending to have been tenable, akin to stopping the music in the middle of a bar. But really, the music could have finished the phrase without having to reprise the motif.

Alain de Botton suggests that the humanities—literature, art, music, drama, Netflix teen rom-coms— should help us to live. De Botton says that "we should look to culture as a repository of consoling ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. We should look to novels and historical narratives to impart moral instruction and edification; to great paintings for suggestions about values; to philosophy to probe our anxieties and offer consolations." The humanities offer these therapeutic and illuminative aspects, allowing us to emerge from their study as slightly less selfish and blinkered human beings.

Children’s stories, in the broadest sense of the term, need more unhappy endings. It is uncontroversial to say that in these formative years, it is important to gently expose children to the wider world. Just as a parent may allow their child a sip of wine at dinner or to earn pocket money by doing chores, we should gently expose young people to grief.

There are two, understandable, reasons why we have given into the temptation to provide children with purely entertaining stories that are too clothed in safety to be genuinely illuminating about loss. First, themes of loss and grief feel too dark to belong in children’s stories. But this is a disservice to authors and illustrators of children’s stories, whose very genius is to encode in whimsical rhymes and transfixing colours and shapes a toolkit for exploring almost all other aspects of what it is to be a little human. They can handle grief too. Also, I am not proselytizing that parents must read their children more stories with unhappy endings or make them watch more sad films. Rather, there should be more options with unhappy endings available, so that a parent has these at hand to supplement their own guidance.

Second, it is tempting to view loss and grief as a rude interruption into our otherwise ordinary lives. This is a mistake. You need not go so far as to embrace the Buddhist mantra that life is suffering to realise the inevitability of experiencing emotional turmoil and agony at some point in our lives. Indeed, the periods in our lives where we—or someone we love—is not going through hardship are the rare periods. And yet, despite claiming that we want children’s stories to gently introduce them to the wide world, we are woefully negligent of our responsibility to provide stories that may help prepare children to deal with adversity.

Before going overseas for a holiday, you might do some background reading to prime yourself and enhance the pleasure of anticipation. You might plan where you want to go, what activities you want to do, and take note of what tourist-traps to avoid. Analogously, as children commence the journey that is life, a little background reading can help them to navigate grief and avoid its pitfalls.

It can feel clumsy and awkward to bring children along to a funeral, even more so than bringing a baby on a plane. But as a society, we seem to recognise how essential it is to children to the funerals of estranged cousins because children are—although it feels harsh to admit—suitably removed from the loss to not be overcome with grief while still recognising the grief in people they know. Going to a funeral as a child provides vital instruction on how to handle grief. For precisely the same reasons that we take children to the funerals of our estranged cousins, there ought to be more children’s stories with unhappy endings. Children’s stories with unhappy endings present a gentler introduction to grief than a real funeral, simulating personal unhappiness and offering children insights into how to deal with emotions.

Disney’s Inside Out wonderfully illustrated how children’s movies could serve a therapeutic role, educating children about how humans experience emotions such as grief. We don’t need more Inside Outs. We need stories about how Little Red Riding Hood processed the murder of her grandmother. We need stories about how Cinderella moved on after Prince Charming failed to track her down. We need stories about how, at the end of high school, we do not need to take comfort in the false sense of security that we will be reunited with the people we love. Letting people go while simultaneously believing you will end up back together is not letting them go; it is cruel. And it is a cruel thing for The Kissing Booth 3 to propagate. The The Kissing Booth 3 squandered an opportunity to console teenagers, on the cusp of entering “the real world”, that friends come and go and grow apart—and that’s okay. And that you can leave a romantic partner in a healthy way, without secretly harbouring the belief that you are soulmates.