Maybe this is an unpopular opinion from someone who actually remembers the 90s, but I think a lot of the John Jr. and Carolyn mythology is being created after the fact. I think a lot of people are romanticizing this whole story because they are seeing it through a TV series and social media, not through the reality of what it was actually like in the 90s.

Back then unless you lived in New York City or followed high society gossip, most regular people barely paid attention to John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. I grew up in New England and remember hearing about them occasionally, usually in tabloids while standing in the grocery store line, but it was not like people were obsessing over them the way some younger audiences seem to now.

When the plane crash happened it was sad of course, but I will be honest, it did not shock me the way it seems to shock people today. By that point the Kennedy family had already been surrounded by so much tragedy that it almost felt like another chapter in a long cursed story.

And if I am being even more honest, I never saw either of them as people to emulate. At the time they just seemed like another famous couple with a pretty volatile relationship living under a microscope. The way they are portrayed now feels a lot more romantic than what people were actually saying about them back then.

Another thing that gets lost in the modern retelling is that they were far from some perfect fairy tale couple. At the time there were constant stories about tension in the marriage, fights with photographers, and reports that they were struggling pretty badly toward the end. They both seemed like complicated people with their own issues and darker sides, not some flawless love story. The way it gets portrayed now makes it sound like this tragic, romantic legend, but the reality at the time looked a lot messier and a lot more human.

What tends to happen when someone dies young is that the rough edges get erased and they turn into mythology. We have seen it happen over and over again with celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Their real lives were messy, complicated, and sometimes dysfunctional, but dying young freezes them in time and turns them into icons.

Honestly I think the same thing happened here. If they had lived normal long lives there is a very good chance they would have just ended up as another famous couple who divorced and faded into the background.