The second time I fell in love, before it began to go well, it went very badly. After only a couple of conversations over coffee, I showed up at my beloved’s apartment and confessed the depth of my feelings — to which she responded, with heartbreaking nonchalance, “Um … what do you expect me to say?” I was so devastated that, in trying to flee, I inadvertently stormed right past her front door and straight into her hallway closet. On my way home, I almost walked into the path of a moving train, then verbally abused the subway conductor for daring to warn me about it. That night I drank an entire bottle of wine, watched the 2005 film adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” for the umpteenth time and cursed my sorry fate.
Yes, I know. You don’t have to tell me what I looked like.
What did I think I would accomplish, pulling some cheesy rom-com move, as if my life were “Say Anything” or “When Harry Met Sally”? Had Hollywood turned me into a tacky derivative? Relationship advice is awash with warnings to not be duped by films. We poor schlubs out in the world don’t have teams of writers scripting our happy endings, experts caution — and so taking inspiration from rom-coms’ corny gestures just sets ourselves up for disappointment.
And it’s true that real life does not tolerate clichés. Falling for someone is a highly individual experience. An unassuming widow’s peak, the sound of their vowels when they’re running late — it’s small, specific details that stoke and justify desire (and that sent me marching to my beloved’s doorstep that night). When we are fervently in love, wrote the novelist Stendhal, “everything is a symbol.” If you have ever disapproved of a friend’s partner, then you were not seeing the same symbols your friend was. But so then, if nothing is more unique than a love affair, how come so many of us watch Nicholas Sparks’s films with the same generic scenes of rain-kissing and love-declaring?
It’s because underneath a rom-com’s boilerplate narrative structures, there is extreme passion and ardor and desperation — and all of that is very true to what the actual nonmovie experience of falling in love feels like. Rom-coms resonate with us because we do see ourselves in them: They function as mirrors through which we can pinpoint and understand our own amorphous feelings. And their sweeping gestures also provide encouragement for us to turn our passions into concrete action.
I have never seen anyone kiss a lover in the pouring rain — in real life, cold rainstorms are no aphrodisiac — but I have witnessed a grown man get down on bended knee and belt out the worst Nickelback cover. His girlfriend, who hates Nickelback, adored it. I was raised by a man who, after a decade of friendship with a woman, got drunk and flew across the country so he could tell her that he couldn’t wait a moment longer to be together. Years later, my mother’s brother was almost arrested for loudly declaiming his regret outside his wife’s window in the middle of the night. (At least he didn’t use a boombox.)
As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann put it, “Showing that one could control one’s passion would be a poor way of showing passion.” I may have made a clown of myself when I showed up out of the blue to declare my love, but nothing else I could have done would have demonstrated the bigness of my feelings more clearly. And I don’t think I would have had the courage to try had I not been bred on a steady diet of finely calibrated melodrama.
Those Hail Mary moments in rom-coms, the porn of courtship, remind us that maudlin embarrassments are often what bring a couple together in the first place. Can these big declarations be stereotypical? Of course — but in the same way all rituals and ceremonies are stereotypical. They provide us with something recognizable. That structure connects us to the many attempts at love fumbled by the millions over the years.
Things turned out OK for me. My corny gesture didn’t go over as badly as I had assumed. In the end, I got the girl — she re-evaluated her reaction, after that initial disastrous moment, because she liked that I was a person capable of such earnest affection. We married. We have gorgeous children. These days, though, our happy ending doesn’t seem as assured as it once did. But it’s not because romantic movies have given us impossible expectations — it’s because a long-term, real-world marriage is hard work, and ongoing, and often we’re too tired to try.
In the challenging moments, however, we have rom-coms. Watching and rewatching on-screen couples’ phony theatrics reminds us of the ways in which our own relationship began. Remembering our origin story — intense, bumbling and yet very real — imbues our middle age with the optimism of our youth. By kicking off our relationship with a rom-com gesture, we ended up giving it a certain durability, taking our romance into an illustrious tradition of other lovers, real and fictional. Sometimes, who you want to be is who others have imagined they were.
Nowadays, my wife and I come together through rom-coms. Watching their overwrought scenes, we laugh and reminisce about the time, all those years ago, when a stupid kid marched into the closet of a beautiful, sophisticated woman, who, later that night, while he was drunk on pride and prejudiced by films, sent him an email.
In that email, she quoted characters from other love stories, whose words were much clearer about her own feelings than she could be.
James Nikopoulos is a writer and scholar from Las Vegas.
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