I recently had a night where I was feeling a bit down and didn’t want to deal with the world. I decided to cocoon myself in my room and curl up under a fluffy blanket, puffy Cheetos in one hand and $9 Moscato in the other. I opened my laptop and logged into Disney Plus. Scrolling through my options, I settled on a classic I had (tragically) only discovered a couple months prior, 10 Things I Hate About You.
I’ll be the first to admit that the movie is an incredibly cheesy cesspit of romantic tropes and clichés, but after watching the same scene five times in a row (when Heath Ledger sings “You’re Just too Good to be True” to Julia Stiles) I added the song to my secret “Romance” playlist and had it on repeat for a week. After all, February was approaching, and love was in the air. I needed to get in the spirit.
If you couldn’t already tell, the cat is out of the bag: I’m a hopeless romantic; probably to a fault. I admit with a hint of shame that I was, and am, one of those girls absolutely in love with the idea of love. I wanted romance. I wanted drama. I wanted the boy I had a crush on since elementary school to realize one day that he had never noticed my effortless beauty, my incredible wit, my irresistible charisma, and fall madly in love with me. I wanted exactly what I saw in the movies. I could be the girl that takes off her glasses and straightens her hair and suddenly is beautiful. The boy next door falls madly in love with her. Surely, if it happens in the movies, it can happen to me.
Instead, I regrettably spent a good portion of my teenage years grappling with a tragic case of singledom. The lack of boys confessing their love to me was underwhelming to say the least. Nobody was sending me bouquets of roses or singing to me on the football field. I would sit with my friends in my basement re-watching the episode of Friends where Monica proposes to Chandler, wondering “why didn’t this boy text me back” or “how is that boy dating that girl,” all the while contemplating why we were such unappealing monsters undeserving of love.
I now chalk up those bouts of extreme melodrama to sporadic teenage hormones and unpredictable mood swings. Besides, at 15, there was no way I was even close to being mature enough for a relationship, no matter how much I told myself I was. But over time, I learned that we live in a pretty pessimistic world where apparently true love isn’t real. Chivalry is dead. Soulmates don’t exist. Finding your “happily ever after” only happens in fairy tales.
But what if that wasn’t true?
I’m sure we’re all hyper-aware that romantic comedies are usually meant for entertainment purposes and aren’t meant to reflect real life. But maybe we are watching these movies wrong. Maybe if we were to change the perspective in which we view them, they can produce a new meaning entirely.
For a couple hours, at least, you are consumed by the timeless story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. It’s cheesy and unpredictable and unrealistic – and it’s absolutely perfect.
Take a personal favourite of mine. The 2009 masterpiece (although that’s just my opinion) He’s Just Not That Into You, a movie I could – okay, I have – watched over and over again. Yes, it’s fuelled by sappy romantic gestures and steamy love affairs. But the stories of infidelity, hopelessness, and the need to be loved are all too relatable and provide a sense of comfort that having these feelings is what makes us human.
Or just this past week, my partner and I cozied up to When Harry Met Sally (he wanted to watch The Godfather, but I consider this a good compromise). Very sappy? Oh yes. And even more predictable. But it also shows that you never know when you will cross paths with someone in life, and sometimes you meet under the most unexpected circumstances. Albeit a stretch, I saw a bit of my own story in this: my partner and I had met on Tinder, and from the beginning I had no intentions of being anything but friends- obviously, that plan didn’t work out.
(And yes, my SO absolutely made fun of me for tearing up at the end. It’s emotional, okay. Sue me.)
The wonderful thing about both of these films is that, by the end, everyone is happy. Sometimes they do end up alone, which proves you really don’t need someone else to complete you. A partner simply adds to your life for the better. What is so extraordinary about these stories is that they are self-aware of their sappy rom-com status, but still find a way to validate the viewer that they are, in fact, normal. Whatever that may be.
In the case of my own life, no, I did not end up dating the aforementioned “boy next door.” In actuality he lived around the corner, proving just how desperately I wanted my own story to relate to the fictional ones I had seen time and time again. Eventually, I learned that these random proclamations of love really do only happen in the movies. In hindsight, I realize that if I was too shy to even say hello, the odds of him pursuing me out of the blue were incredibly slim. Admittedly, after I moved for school, I somewhat regretted that I never had the courage to say anything and convinced myself that “true love” was reserved only for the cinema, and I stopped actively searching for it. But because of this, I was able to open myself up to who is now my current partner. Sure, there was never a slow-motion kiss in the rain, and he’s never stood outside my apartment with a boombox. But, for whatever reason, he loves me for the person I am. And really, I can’t ask for a more perfect story than that.
Spoiler alert: by the end of 10 Things I Hate About You, he gets the girl. Not surprising. But she remains the strong-willed, independent, slightly broken person that she is, and she embraces it.
This should be a message for all women: if Julia Stiles doesn’t have to change herself for a guy, neither should you.