I’ll be the first to admit that rom-coms are my not-so-guilty pleasure.
There, I’ve said it, I unashamedly love rom-coms, and I’m sure many of you do, too. This is a rom-com-loving safe space. And truthfully, I feel as though they get a lot of hate for no reason. Yes, they may be cheesy, but who cares? A good rom-com is the perfect feel-good movie we need from time to time.
The beauty of rom-coms comes with their simplistic nature. You don’t need an intense death scene or someone to get into a crazy accident first for you to get to the happy part. Not every movie needs to be layered with meaning and have a deeply misunderstood character. Sometimes, you just want to escape in a cookie-cutter, picture-perfect movie about young love where everyone wins in the end, and that is why rom-coms are perfect.
Because of their formulaic nature, rom-coms can feel very familiar, which I think only adds to the comfortable feeling you get while watching them. You follow one or two main characters as they fall in love, usually because of some fated alignment like starting a new job or attending the same high school. A little after the halfway mark, there tends to be some big fight, but before the final ten minutes of the film, everything gets resolved like nothing ever happened and the two live happily ever after.
Plain and simple. If a movie is a romantic comedy, nine times out of ten you don’t need to have watched it to already know what will happen. And even though this sounds repetitive, the nuances of these movies make them so special, which is why we can have hundreds of movies within this one subgenre that we will never grow tired of.
Like, for example, in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, both of the main characters are unaware of the other’s true motives, or in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the “fake dating” to “head over heels in love” trope shines. Each movie embraces its own qualities to make it stand out from the sea of other rom-coms.
Besides the familiarity of these movies, I think what really draws us into the romantic comedy is the giddy, warm and fuzzy feeling that these movies give us. Rom-coms were made for the hopeless romantics, the ones who believe in “love at first sight” and having a soulmate. Every good rom-com I’ve watched has brought me back to that feeling of being 16 with that raging crush on the guy in math class. The butterflies in your stomach churn and even the cheesiest lines make you blush.
At the end of the day, the rom-com is never going to die out. It’s a classic and timeless genre with the ability to adapt to every generation. Whether you are watching Clueless, Love Rosie or even The Kissing Booth, each generation of movies brings its own twists on romance. So once again, yes, I do love rom-coms, and I don’t plan on that changing anytime soon.