After On the Couch

Hardin Scott On the Couch

After reading the first book from the series I was absolutely sure that I needed to have Hardin Scott on my couch. To be honest, the 'hurricane Hessa' - as the character Landon Gibson called it in Nothing More (an After spin-off) - itself is just a good reason for a whole psychoanalytical process, but that's not the main point here. This text is obviously about fragments from my understanding of Hardin Scott, who inevitably goes through my own issues. After all, why shall we read a novel if we can't create our own character, right?

Not even the book Before can explain why Hardin Scott is so short-tempered during the first months when he started his relationship with Tessa Young - and with the world - as it is happens only once he opens up and manages to express his feelings. In After Ever Happy (Book 4) we get to know a 'new' character who shows some regrets in life and is willing to become a husband and father, someone who he'd never considered to become. But we know that it hadn't been that easy. Hardin decided to go to therapy as he struggled to be geographically away from Tessa, but not really aware that first, he had to be far so then he could be close. Anna Todd doesn't dwell long on this moment of the character's life as she - just like us - is mainly interested in knowing what they were doing together. Always together!

Before entering our beloved character's mind we must draw our attention to the passionate couple Hessa. They live a typical love story that involves feelings in their deepest form: love, pain, anger, desire, and tension. It is an endless circle, especially because it ends before it finishes. When they get closer to becoming a traditional couple, they find a way to make that safe place collapse, almost on purpose. Handin is initially afraid of getting involved, but I suppose that the more he attempted to keep Tessa away, the closer he would bring her back to him. It is always a new beginning for them. It is a relationship with several beginnings where they are not allowed to put out the fire of their passion in exchange to the convenience of calmer days. And it is this narrative that Anna creates as it is just when they finally make things work that the story ends. There's no more 'fire' to be put out - literally, as far as Hardin is concerned (: And we must agree that, if Tessa wanted an easier relationship, she would have never broken up with Noah.

We know that the end is everything we've been expecting through all the four books and that Tessa's blue-gray colored eyes have never been empty of love for Hardin, not even after being together for years and with two children. Anyway, the focus here is to analyze the narrative that goes on during ninety percent of the series, which is filled with break-ups and addicting reconciliations that make us keep reading one book after another.

Scott, HardinIt is through Tessa that Hardin gets to know his world. As he unveils to her who she really is, she rewards him by fully disclosing his story and allowing Hardin to know himself better. It is amazing how Tessa's professional life reveals Hardin's unconsciousness. From her roommate Steph to the discovery of her 'not-so-good' friends from the fraternity parties, until the beginning of her career life. Tessa nestles herself in the houses of 'both' Hardin's fathers during most part of the story. Whenever he hurt her, she would seek shelter in the place where he had never had it.

Hardin holds to Tessa as if he couldn't stay away from his own history. The encounter with his sweetheart takes him to feeling madly in love and to his own essence, on many levels. She shows him that it is possible to love, but for it to happen, he must face his fears, his family and himself.

He creates his own enigma that reveals who he really is behind his 'bad-boy' mask. This enigma also keeps his relationship going. It is what Freud defines in hysteria from his famous question "what does the other want from me?". This game between the 'not-knowing' and the 'wanting-to-know' is what keeps both of them in this - apparently sick - relationship that comes and goes, but it is healthy considering that they feel well when they're together and cannot disconnect. Hardin is a real troublemaker but Anna Todd successfully finds a way out when, from the second book on, she gives Hardin a voice before the reader starts to hate him. Regardless of all his mistakes, it is impossible to hate Hardin. It is his imperfection that captivates the readers, who may even feel angry at Tessa when she tries to keep him away.

Anna heard in many interviews that Hardin could be abusive. Tessa also tells him so in After Ever Happy and he gets upset when he realizes that's the way she sees their relationship. At the end of the book, however, Hardin gets his voice - as if representing Anna's - and explains his own point of view especially when he convinces Tessa that After should be published. He says, "People have to read this book to understand there are no perfect relationships as in novels" and, in the following chapter, Tessa adds, "It's easy for you to judge someone or a relationship when you're not involved".

Hardin awakes the best and the worst that lies within whom reads his story. But Hardin is each one of us. It is from the other that we can see ourselves. We just know what love and pain are if there's someone to provoke them inside us. Tessa is Hardin's unconscious mirror that expresses itself without borders or filters and awakes the most archaic human reactions, such as aggressiveness and sexual impulses. The discomfort only starts when he has to be 'civilized' according to the rules of love and starts to put himself through someone else's social standards - here, through Tessa's rules, which also become the reader's rules.

On the other hand, Hardin deconstructs Tessa's 'civilized' speech and invites her to live the human impulses unabashedly. That's what appeals to her. In this crazy attempt to live both discourses, they compromise and agree it's better to have a bit of each.

However, the main agreement the couple makes in the narrative is; we choose to live the inconsistency of love. This is what couples do. Hardin and Tessa are a perfect example for the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's famous quote, "Love is giving to the other something you do not own, which goes beyond yourself". In other words, love is recognizing your faults and giving them to the other, putting them on the other. It isn't about giving what you have, property, gifts; it is giving something that you don't have and that goes beyond yourself. Once we understand both After protagonists when the reading is complete, we just see the donation of what lacks from one to another. That is, we only see love.

About the author

I am probably twice older than most of Anna Todd's readers. I've been a journalist for ten years and a psychologist for almost three. On my 31st birthday, I got the book After from a group of psychoanalyst friends. I'm a researcher in the Psychoanalysis and Digital Culture area and I care for teenagers and young adults in my clinic. This was their excuse to give me Anna Todd's book instead of Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan's. It was just as well that they did so. Within a month I had already finished reading the whole series. And now it's just After.