“Seriously. Another happy ending. Perfect love, of course. In Long Shot, the characters played by Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron find each other, fall in love, and make it work before the credits roll. Why is every love story made to look so simple?”
Rom-coms are just a fancy way of serving bad food. They look great, but they leave you with a stomachache.
Why? Because they can distort what we expect from love. They spend most of their time getting two people together. Then, just as the real work begins, the story ends.
A movie compresses an entire relationship into a couple of hours and gives most of that time to the beginning. We see two people awkwardly get together. Maybe they marry. Cue the happy ending.
Movie over.
Bullshit.
Alain de Botton, founder and chairman of The School of Life, describes this romantic delusion in a 2017 interview with Krista Tippett on the podcast On Being:
“Compatibility is an achievement of love. It shouldn’t be the precondition of love, as we nowadays, in a slightly spoiled way, imagine it must be.”
That line stays with me because I have caught myself expecting love to feel effortless, as if difficulty meant something had already gone wrong. It is an easy expectation to carry and a hard one to live with.
Love is not simply the rush of thinking, “Oh my God, we understand each other perfectly. We’re perfect together, aren’t we?”
That is how we paint a false picture of relationships. We convince ourselves that the perfect relationship exists and that we only have to find it. Of course we want that kind of love. But we are imperfect people. We will never be superhuman, so how can we expect another flawed person to be perfect for us?
Aren’t we silly?
Real love is rough. Sometimes it hurts. But love being difficult does not excuse cruelty or abuse. No one should stay in an unsafe relationship to prove their commitment. Love may be an endurance race, but endurance is not the same as tolerating harm.
In a healthy relationship, two imperfect people will still misunderstand each other, disappoint each other, and have to figure out how to meet in the middle. We will not always know what the other person needs. Sometimes we will not even understand what we need ourselves.
I know that because I once wrote a letter to someone I loved during basic training and waited a week before sending it. When she did not answer, I accepted that the door had probably closed. Then, while I was home on holiday leave, she reached out. We started talking again and decided to try again.
At the time, I saw that second chance as proof that I had changed enough. I had lost the weight, gotten sober, and joined the Army. I thought I had finally become the man who could give us the future we wanted. But even a second chance does not skip the difficult part. I had changed my body, my habits, and my environment. That did not mean I suddenly knew how to be a good partner.
I still had to learn how to communicate, listen, and take responsibility without expecting forgiveness to do the work for me. That is the part rom-coms leave out. They make love look like the reward at the end of the struggle. In real life, becoming a better person does not automatically make you a better partner. You still have to show up and do the work.
Rom-coms stop at the promise. Real life has to wake up the next morning.