Cards on the table, I love a good romcom. I love the improbable plot twists, the grand gestures and, above all, the fail-safe happy endings. I’ve been a fan since my early teens, when I first saw Pretty Woman. Ah, a socially unsophisticated yet street-smart hooker falls for a ruthless opera-loving businessman. Who could resist?
Since then I’ve sat through almost every romantic comedy thinkable (good and bad) and while I’ve enjoyed watching the classically clumsy (in an endearing sort of way) female leads navigate their way to true love, I’ve started to wonder if the warm and fuzzy feeling they provide could have had an adverse effect on how I view real relationships… you know, ‘real’ in the sense that ruthless opera-loving businessmen don’t usually want to settle down with former sex workers.
What prompted this self-reflection? Well, I turned 33 this month and after being repeatedly asked by my husband what I wanted for my birthday, I told him, “Zero, zip, zilch”. I had everything I could want, I explained, beaming at him with love-filled eyes. While breakfast in bed would be a nice, I was happy for the day to pass by without a fuss.
However, when the day came, after breakfast, I got tetchy. Where was the blue Tiffany box that was meant to be served with my poached eggs, I thought. By midday I was thinking, ‘No bunch of flowers?’ and by the evening I had a full-on meltdown when he walked through the door with a takeaway pizza and it dawned on me that he wasn’t about to surprise me with a table at Zuma.
“You said you didn’t want anything,” he pointed out matter-of-factly.
“Yes, but that doesn’t actually mean I don’t want anything,” I said defiantly. “You should have surprised me by sweeping me off my feet, or something…” He stared back at me, utterly perplexed, before - with his usual perceptiveness - pointing out, “You watch too many romantic movies.”
And he’s right. The unlikely happy endings I expose myself to on a regular basis are probably largely to blame for my warped sense of the ‘perfect’ relationship. For most of my adult life I’ve been wailing about how one boyfriend or another doesn’t woo me enough. The conclusion? Perhaps the films I watch, where heroines come home to apartments filled with rose petals, are setting the bar a bit too high.
To be fair, box-office hits are not going to be made by showing couples arguing about who’ll take out the rubbish, but for most of us, that’s daily life. Therefore, the way these films portray romance is brainwashing us into thinking our love lives don’t cut it.
What evidence do I have to support this? Well, a team at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, studied 40 films released between 1995 to 2005, to establish common themes. They then asked hundreds of people to describe their relationship expectations. What they discovered was that fans of films such as You’ve Got Mail, The Wedding Planner and While You Were Sleeping (three of my faves), often failed to communicate with their partners, with many holding the view that if someone is your soulmate, they should know what you want and shouldn’t need to be told.
In short, if we think that love is a fairy tale, we are misunderstanding the everyday demands of being in a successful relationship. Don’t believe me. Ask any long-married couple the secret to a successful relationship and they will say hard work, not grand gestures. As much as the motion pictures would have us believe it, romance doesn’t succeed by magic.
