‘Off Campus’ is about more than romance. It’s about redefining family

Some of the quietest damage is done in houses that look perfectly normal to others from the outside. Where a parent’s love comes with conditions attached, where a child learns early to manage their parent’s emotions before their own, where affection is wielded as a reward and withdrawn as punishment

There is a moment in Off Campus, Amazon Prime Video’s latest romance series — an adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s book series — that made me pause. His best friend, John Logan, tells Garrett Graham, a young man haunted by an abusive father, something devastatingly simple: “You are not your dad, okay?” In five words, an entire architecture of belonging is built. A home not bound by blood, but by choice.

Season 1 of Off Campus gives us two protagonists navigating the complicated business of being human. Garrett has grown up under the long shadow of an abusive father, and so keeps himself at arm’s length from most who could offer him community and connection, terrified that the proximity will reveal something monstrous in him. He is in an uphill battle, trying to prove – to himself, more than anyone else – that he is nothing like his father. Hannah Wells, on the other hand, can no longer return to a town she called home after facing backlash from what she considered her community following a sexual assault when she was 15. She has to figure out how to trust again. What saves them both is not family in the traditional sense. It is the people they find along the way, Logan, Dean Di Laurentis, John Tucker, and Allie Hayes, who show up, stay, and remind them that they are worth showing up for: A found family.

And it is not just a television or book trope. For millions of people, it is, in a way, survival.

In India, we are raised on a rigid notion: “Akhir mein apne hi kaam aate hain” (In the end, only your own people will stand by you). The family or the bond of blood is positioned as the irreducible constant in a world full of uncertainty. This is, in many cases, a beautiful truth. Biological families can be extraordinary wells of love, resilience, and support.

But far too often, this belief also functions as a cage.

Some of the quietest damage is done in houses that look perfectly normal to others from the outside. Where a parent’s love comes with conditions attached, where a child learns early to manage their parent’s emotions before their own, where affection is wielded as a reward and withdrawn as punishment. Children who grew up in these homes often reach adulthood carrying a specific kind of exhaustion, one that comes from never having been truly seen. There are young people even today who cannot say out loud who they love or express their gender freely. Not because they do not know themselves, but because they have watched what happens when you trust the wrong person with that truth. The fear lives in the body. And for some, it never fully leaves.

Then there are women who reach out for help from within marriages that are slowly swallowing them, but are gently, firmly, lovingly told to go back “home”. To try harder. To think of the family name. The tragedies that follow are rarely surprising. They are the end of a long silence that no one chose to break. An outside voice — an honest, unconditional, non-judgmental presence — could have made all the difference. Avoidable tragedy is simply what the absence of support costs.

This is why what the transgender community in India has built for themselves matters so deeply. Largely abandoned by their birth families and underserved by the state, trans individuals have created their own found families, building shelters and care networks where people are accepted without negotiation. It is kinship, constructed entirely from the decision not to let anyone face exile alone.

The real question is not whether family matters. Of course it does. The question is whether we are willing, as a society, to give people permission to define it for themselves. Perhaps the most radical act of care is to tell someone they are not obligated to keep bleeding. That they can leave. That the leaving is not a weakness. That they can build a table of their own, and fill the seats with people who actually want to be there.

Like Harry Styles sang in ‘Matilda’ :

“You can let it go
You can throw a party full of everyone you know
And not invite your family, ’cause they never showed you love
You don’t have to be sorry for leaving and growing up”

The writer is trainee journalist, The Indian Express. [email protected]