Every season a new romantic comedy makes millions of dollars in Hollywood. Most recently, Friends With Benefits came on the scene, grossing more than 24 million, with Justin Timberlake playing the leading man who winds up falling in love after agreed-upon no-strings sex with Mila Kunitz (I liked it way better the first time, by the way, back when it was called About Last Night, starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, and was more so about how sex is much easier than a relationship.) This narrative, where a boy has sex (or kisses, or sees, or dances with) a girl and then finds he's in love with her has been around for ages. Consider almost any romantic comedy - Pretty Woman or The Proposal - or any fairy tale - Tangled or Beauty and The Beast - and the story is always the same. A boy is taken with a girl because of her beauty, often combined with a quirky trait, and that's it. He's done for. It is her and only her for the rest of his life.
So what? you might think. It's certainly not news that most romantic comedies are not high art. They are often mind-numbing entertainment and nothing more. But I would argue that they are actually somewhat harmful. Too often I hear women talk about their disappointment with the ways in which their real lives lack this sort of romance. Surely, they tell me, there is something wrong with them, something wrong with their lives, because they don't have love stories like this. They have relationships and everything goes to hell. They have sex and the guy never calls again. The things that happen are never ever like the romance narratives that have permeated our cultural consciousness. And because of this, they assume there is something wrong with them. They do what we call catastrophic thinking: if no one has ever loved me like that, I am not worth loving. I am not lovable.
Not surprisingly, real life is messier. Men fall in love with you but then realize they've changed. Men fall in love with you, then you come down off your pedestal and they fall out. Men have sex with you because they want to get laid but they're just not that into you. Some of them don't like you at all. Or men like you fine but they're in no mood to have a relationship right now.
Also, though, men do fall in love with you after many years. Or you find yourself in love in unexpected situations. Love happens. There is no doubt about that. But how it happens is so completely individual that we couldn't possibly put guidelines around its development. Love can look so many different ways. We know this, or at least I think we know this, and yet almost every time we see love on the big Hollywood screen, it follows the exact same arc.
If you look at the few romantic comedies that do actually break the mold, you can see what I mean: Harold and Maude, Love Actually, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...these movies suggest that love doesn't follow any predictable path, that it shows up in unexpected forms, and that "happily ever after" is somewhat impossible. Instead, you go through hell together, you come out the other side, and romance is actually built in this intensely personal, intensely individual way.
I wish more girls and women understood that the romance model they get handed in the movieplex is just fantasy and not a worthwhile goal. Real love, love worth having pretty much never follows that same-old story arc.
* Title credit goes to Tara Dublin of @taradublinrocks
* Thanks one again to Shabana Malone whose conversation inspired this essay
