Do Romantic Comedies Ruin Real Relationships?

That's the implication of a new survey conducted recently in Australia. According to survey respondents, the "happily ever after" endings so common in the genre have created expectations that real relationships fail to meet - such as the belief that one can or should always know what one's partner is thinking, or that they should regularly receive flowers "just because".

Though it's not stated outright, I strongly suspect that most of the respondents to this survey were female, and the survey's findings square with the theory that the typical Hollywood romcom is essentially emotional pornography for women. Just as actual pornography supposedly leads men to nurture unrealistic expectations about their partners and their sex lives, romantic comedies, with their idealized, Hallmark card vision of romantic relationships, so the argument goes, do so for women. I'm not convinced that this is true - I'm skeptical of such sweeping claims, particularly when they're based on survey results that don't appear to have been gathered under particularly scientific conditions -but the thesis is thought-provoking.

Any real human relationship is going to be affected as much by the human flaws of the people engaged in it as by their positive feelings for each other, and those flaws, and the negative emotions they engender, will occasionally manifest themselves as conflict. This is particularly true once external stressors (e.g. having children) enter the picture. So eternally Happily Ever After is a clearly a myth. Similarly, knowing your partner's every thought is not possible nor, were it possible, would it be desirable. Most people I know seem to entertain thoughts which would be hurtful to their partners were they to share them - niggling personal criticisms, resentments, fantasies about other members of the opposite sex, and so on. This is only natural - if there is anyone alive who feels 100% positively about the person they're with, they'll change their mind about that eventually. But why would anyone want to know every time their partner thought something bad about them? Love and devotion are real things, but they exist side-by-side in any human psyche with other, less admirable emotions. We express the former and censor or judiciously edit the latter because it is generally healthier for us to do so. As for roses or candy all the time, if the gesture is repeated too frequently, doesn't it lose its meaning? It's good to do special things for one's significant other occasionally, but by definition what makes them special is the fact that they're only done occasionally - I suspect that a man who gave a woman roses every week would quickly find her tiring of them. Indeed, in the few instances in which I have seen this kind of behavior in real life, it created a real unease in the woman receiving the gifts because she came to feel awkward about being idealized and obligated to her admirer for trying so hard rather than flattered or appreciated.

So no, crappy middling romantic comedies are not a good basis on which to found one's expectations of love and romance. But it seems to me that most people I know - mature adults, at least - have figured that out, and have (if through painful experience) learned that real relationships sometimes require work, sacrifice, and a very unsexy attention to practical details as well as spontaneity and passion. The best romantic comedies find a way to acknowledge this truth, even if they also try to sell us a romantic fantasy. Lesser ones don't, but that is one of the major reasons they're considered lesser. Are there really people out there who take their cues from Maid In Manhattan or The Ugly Truth? If so, ugh. Romance is in more trouble than we could have guessed.

Why Do People Use Missed Connections Ads?

Tyler Cowen, one of the sharpest, quirkiest, and most original thinkers I know of, muses on the question. My theory is that for the people that use them, these ads inject a little romance and serendipity into modern urban life, which is otherwise rather routinized and predictable. The idea that that fetching stranger on the subway platform might be one's soulmate provides a moment of pleasant diversion even from the routines of work, leisure, and socialization that dominate our days and can quickly become tedious in the face of our hunger for novel and exciting experience. Placing an ad is akin to buying a lottery ticket - it gives a person a chance to construct an appealing romantic fantasy, at a low cost.

Since I'd guess that most ads go unanswered, the fantasy is also more likely to remain intact, unalloyed by the mitigating complexities of human interaction that inevitably emerge in any real relationship. Furthermore, placing an ad enables people to express romantic interest without fear of failure - if no one answers the ad, it's not because one has been duly considered, judged wanting, and rejected, but merely because fate has declined to accommodate. That seems cold comfort to me - after all, one is still alone at the end of the exercise - but I suppose it at least saves people from beating themselves up for being unable to express their interest in others, in addition to beating themselves up for being alone.

Personally, I left this sort of romantic daydreaming behind a long time ago in favor of a more direct approach - when I felt an attraction, acting on it, no matter how awkward I felt about doing so. I asked out women I knew fairly well, sure, but also a waitress in a coffee shop I frequented, a fellow student to whom I'd never spoken, a woman who showed me an apartment, a girl I met on a train - whoever, however I met them, when I felt a spark. Certainly this approach has brought its fair share of rejection, failure, and romantic disappointment in addition to quite a few interactions that began and then dead-ended before much came of them. I think, however, that these experiences were valuable - from the rejections I learned not to fear rejection, and from the dead ends not to approach any potential relationship with unrealistic expectations. When I've had successes - well, from them I've learned that finding love is a problem that will crack if you take enough swings at it. I met my girlfriend, whom I've now been dating for fifteen months, under circumstances that very well might have turned into a missed connection had I not immediately acted on the spark I felt. The same was true of my previous girlfriend, with whom things ultimately didn't work out romantically but with whom I remain friendly. I think the way to find love is to dive into the water and take your lumps along the way, and that requires being proactive. If all someone wants to do is daydream about finding love, however, letting the moment slip and posting a Missed Connections ad serves perfectly well.