Being a hopeless romantic in this society is hard enough. Coupling that with romantic films can be a recipe for disaster. Let me tell you why.
It wasn't until I recently watched Sex and the City that I realized I had been avoiding the romance genre altogether. Without saying too much, I was not a fan of Mr. Big. Pausing the film 40 minutes in to ponder on how we sometimes accept the gesture of someone's world when we're both watering grass in different galaxies. The empath in me was being awoken. Then it clicked. It was how much I could relate that struck me. Having been through my share of heartbreak, I didn't like how real the concept of relationships was being portrayed. Usually when the notion of love is presented to us, we picture fairy-tale endings and cupid by your side. Even the not so nice movie moments are followed by a musical switch up and a tragically cliche scene. Mr. Big was not aligning with that fairy-tale fantasy. At first.
This may just be an unpopular opinion that I have but I'm sharing it anyway. Traditional romance movies do not perpetuate the idea of healthy love connections. They instead sugar-coat realistic problems and make us think that our below-par love life is worth holding onto. It definitely isn't. In fact, not only should we scrap our most loyal sneaky link, but we also need to look within to discover why we won't let go of Elias who we met at the gym post valentine’s day. We're all romantics at heart and there's nothing wrong with that. A line should only be drawn when we try to turn our most toxic connections into our best love story.
My initial reasoning for disliking Mr. Big was that he didn't write Carrie love letters. Well, he didn't necessarily behave like her ideal prince charming. Whilst the reason may not sound valid to you, it's very valid for my inner Cinderella. That idea of romance appeals to me and so I carried on watching the movie, with a little distaste for love. It wasn't that he didn't have a bird fly an engraved letter over to Carrie every morning. It was that I overlooked the fact that this was just a movie, and these two don't actually have decades worth of history. Too often, we take the actions in films at face value, because we're meant too. Just not in a naive way. If this were to have been a real-life relationship, we'd have to assume that with a Carrie and Mr. Big timeline, we would know our partner like the back of our hand. We'd know the love language of one another, and we'd create our own fairy-tale love. This isn't to say that we should boycott romance films and call it a day. It's to say that understanding we love, and are loved, in such more both beautiful and complex ways. A two-hour act of that could never sum up how it is to have a heart that is capable of love.
We rely on these short movies to dictate how our love lives should go. All because we're shown it from seed to bloom. In truth, none of us know how each of our many love stories will go. That's the point. So instead of looking everywhere else to figure out the course of your love, look within at your very moment. I admit it did take me a while to understand why Carrie and Big re-inspired me. It's because I was reluctant to see that those two, however fictional they may be, are one of the few good stories I like. From beginning to end, you see just how they go from not properly communicating, to understanding one another perfectly enough to cultivate their own great love.
"Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get–only with what you are expecting to give–which is everything."
–Katharine Hepburn
Comments