As a book lover, I’m a sucker for the cheesy romantic things that happens in books. I’m also a big fan of crazy grand adventures and things happening in ways no one could ever dream of. I have noticed a few things though… People sometimes take things that happen in books, movies and TV shows and think that it happens frequently in our everyday lives.
Everyday life isn’t always exciting. When you’re reading a novel, you don’t hear about the normal days. It’s not “This morning I got up and got breakfast, and then I went to class. My friends talked about classes, blah blah blah.” No one wants to read that- I know I wouldn’t. When you follow a story, it starts when life gets a little more interesting and you skip the boring and uneventful days. So when I hear friends and passerby’s complain about how the day was boring and they wish their life was more exciting, it makes me think a little bit. We can’t expect everyday to be exciting, for us to always be going on some grand adventure, that would be exhausting. We need a break every now and then so we can appreciate the next exciting part of our lives a little more than we would before.
It’s the same case when it comes to romantic stories. In novels and motion pictures, you see grand gesture after grand gesture of a boy sweeping a girl off her feet and getting a fairytale ending. As much as anyone would love to be a part of that, it’s just not realistic. In today’s society, everyone is afraid of rejection. We’re too afraid to admit our feelings half the time, let alone grab a microphone at a sporting event and profess their love in front of a crowd of people. Some people are waiting for people to make these grand gestures, and not being satisfied with a simple coffee date or a night out. I’m not saying that anyone should settle, I’m just saying that we shouldn’t turn something down because it’s not what we expected. It’s not normal to just be kissed by a random person because they were avoiding their ex girlfriend. If anything, that’s creepy. We like consent, people.
With these high expectations, we also see some people trying to be the boys in the movies. Movies are all about being out there, but that’s not always what works. It’s not fun to be singled out in a crowd and have to make a personal decision in a very public place. It can be unsettling to receive an anonymous letter in someone’s mailbox. What might be romantic to some girls, is weird to others. We have a tendency as humans to generalize, and a lot of times, it gets us in trouble.
The boy in the book isn’t real. Not every grand gesture is effective. Not everyone expects or wants the same things as others. Everyday can’t be exciting. In reality, we are a lot more chill and reserved. I’m not saying that these things don’t work ever, it’s just not as frequent as it is in fiction. We do see grand gestures, we do see some fairytale endings, but we still manage to have pretty spectacular lives without them.