Are Rom-Coms Our Excuse for BecomingLove Skeptics? by Altea Munuera García

I hate scary movies. I have never understood their appeal. In my mind, it makes no sense why people would willingly sit through two hours of jump scares and underlying tension just for everything to end (usually) well. For you to go back to your normal life — a relatively boring one in which (hopefully) no serial killer with a ghost mask is chasing you, and no clown is hiding in the gutters to kidnap your brother. And to do this for fun!? Incomprehensible. Alas, isn’t this what movies are for? To immerse us in feelings so intensely that, for a fleeting moment, we forget the mundanity of our real lives.

Last month’s celebrations (Valentine’s Day) had me thinking about how this applies to romance, too. People, myself included, are obsessed with romance movies, so much so that their whole Letterboxd becomes consumed with them — not such an asset when you are trying to defend that you are a legit and well-rounded media studies major, let me tell you. And so, amidst conversations in which my whole personality becomes pitching to people that romantic movies are not just entertainment, but indeed give you new ways in which to look at the world, I have begun rejecting the idea that these movies are a form of escapism, a way for us to ignore our lives. Instead, I argue that they are, in a way, exposure therapy. Perhaps just as with horror movies, we enjoy the fictionality of the possibility of romance, or perhaps it is through overexposure to the ideas of a perfect love, meet-cutes, and a happy ending that we aim to become desensitized to this type of affection. A sort of protection before we can ever fall too deep in.

We complain that these movies create “unrealistic expectations” for our own romantic encounters, but maybe that is the reason we watch them at all. Underneath whatever criticism you may have towards romantic movies, everyone still hopes that someone will read us the story of how we fell in love every day if we ever get dementia, that someone will offer us their wood plank if we are ever in a tragic boat crash, or that someone will write a poem about how you are the only one they don’t hate. We crave a great love which overcomes challenges, one that situates us at the centre of a narrative again.

In some sense, deep down, we know the chances of having a successful home swap from a tiny town in the U.K. to somewhere in L.A. are slim, and then falling in love with your host’s brother is even more unlikely. Still, these movies help us hold out hope, while we rationally autoconvince ourselves that this is impossible. Romantic movies allow us to experience what love feels like, all the while being able to fall back on the defensive argument that they aren’t even quality media at all, and that their fictionality makes it okay for our society to put less effort into these connections. Our expectations will never match our real life, and that is okay because, at the end of the day, they are expectations based on fiction. Is it okay to have become desensitized to love, or is this just another indication of how reserved we are becoming?