For me, safety, comfort and happiness are found in the two hours of watching a movie on the couch.
I watch about two movies a week, usually gravitating toward a rewatch of a familiar favorite rather than watching something new.
While I genuinely enjoy watching the artistry and passion of small indie films or the deeper, unspoken meanings in cinema, I’m always drawn to one genre in particular: Romantic comedies.
Rom-coms are insatiable experiences spanning countless tropes. One example is the “friends to lovers,” which usually includes two characters intertwined in a lifelong friendship until they learn that they’re in love with each other by the end of the movie.
My love for these movies started when I was young, beginning with Disney Princess classics where the princess falls in love with Prince Charming. The princess is then saved from an encroaching evil and they live happily ever after in marriage.
As I grew up, rom-coms became more than just movies — they were a shared ritualistic experience amongst friends. Watching these movies in high school felt like an act of womanhood. My friends and I would scream at the TV during moments like Darcy’s hand flex in “Pride and Prejudice” or discuss how hopelessly in love we were with Heath Ledger from “10 Things I Hate About You”.
I wouldn’t call myself sentimental. I take things in stride, rationalizing rather than getting swept up in emotion. But that is why I have always enjoyed that two-tri-letter abbreviation known as rom-coms. They offered an idealized, lustrous and unabashedly feminine world I longed for throughout my youth.
Although many movies’ themes matured as I got older, the ending was typically the same. Despite the obstacles or trouble, love was always the solution. For the longest time, I believed love was the cure-all for the trials and tribulations of reality.
My perspective of romance changed when I recently watched my favorite, “When Harry Met Sally.”
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched Harry and Sally argue on a road trip or share an awkward lunch in a classic New York City deli. I could probably recite the movie’s ending, where Harry professes his love to Sally with a classic monologue about being with the person you love for the rest of your life.
But this most recent rewatch felt different. Instead of seeing their story as a quirky over-exaggeration of what it feels like to be in love, I saw the flaws between Harry and Sally. Their lives, once aspirational, now felt so narrowly focused on romance that other struggles barely existed.
When I was younger, I loved the perfectly tied-together ending — no matter how much time passed or how complicated relationships get, love would triumph in the end. But this time I realized what was missing. Both Harry and Sally’s biggest dilemmas weren’t their careers or even how they could grow personally, it was simply whether they would end up together.
Rewatching made me realize my perspective has shifted from when I initially watched Disney Princesses falling in love. I stopped imagining that my life would be complete with a relationship or seeking out a perfect ending in marriage.
Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older and have from my own experience of love while dealing with personal hardships, changing plans and balancing all other aspects of life. Either way, I now understand that romance and relationships are not the cure-alls I once believed true.
In real life, love isn’t about that last moment of grand gesture, it’s about how people navigate change and the maturation of trust over time. Romance is about subtle moments like having the same humor.
And yet, I still love rom-coms. I still find myself on my couch, watching the movies and falling into their perfect world. Not because I see love as the ending, but because I know that love – real love – is about having someone to navigate the chaos of life with.
Rom-coms once taught me to reach for perfection. Now, they’re a reminder of the mistakes and troubles of life and how important love is in those moments of hardship.
Love matters, not as a solution to every problem, but because it’s something worth holding onto.
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