I know the title sounds crazy, but I need you all to give me a chance to explain myself! It’s not that I was outside movie theaters boycotting The Notebook or anything (because 1. it’s never that serious and 2. I was literally two years old when it came out). It was more of a general eyebrow furrow that I’d respond with when asked to watch a rom-com. I never understood why anyone would care about exactly when Harry met Sally or what exactly all 10 of those reasons were that made Kat hate Patrick.
It also didn’t help that seemingly everyone on Earth was so rude to the people who did enjoy rom-coms. I didn’t want to be that girl, the girl who got teary-eyed at someone standing outside your window with a boombox showing how much they love you, the girl who was the butt of my crush’s jokes. I didn’t want to fall for any of it. The girls that didn’t watch them, the girls that seemed so cool to me, exclaimed that rom-coms were all patriarchal nonsense and tricks to keep women down. These movies punch down at women and our experiences with dating and love.
It’s all very capitalist, you see. They construct some fairytale-like romance with men that will never exist and shove it down your throat, urging you to visit the closest movie theatre. There will never be a man that’ll kiss you like *that* in the pouring rain nor will there ever be a man willing to throw away any part of himself or his career for you in real life, but there will be in our movie! Come along and obsess over these hot twenty-somethings living the life that you will never ever have. They were anti-feminist! And you better believe I was a god-damned feminist; so I kept my distance. And besides, the ones the girls in class liked didn’t feature people like me anyways. It was white hetero garbage.
I kept up this almost obligatory hatred for so many years of my life. I laughed when my friend cried over 50 First Dates. “It’s such a stupid concept. I don’t get why you’re crying. No man would ever do that, hell no person would ever do that,” I joked at her. I rolled my eyes at my mom when she asked me if I wanted to see Me Before You. I wouldn’t have been caught dead watching that crap. I only went out to watch The Fault in Our Stars because I read the book and I wanted to see if it lived up to it; it’d be a waste to not go, my friends already got the tickets. This hate even progressed into my reading habits. Any romance book I had would take me months to finish no matter how many pages. I just couldn’t deal. It was like I had just given up on love as a concept in general. Cheesy acts of affection I saw online made me full body cringe and I avoided the dating scene at all costs; it wasn’t for me, I’d tell my friends. I was so removed from it all.
Keyword: was. I’m not sure of the exact timeline, but sometime within the last year, I broke. I was hanging at a friend’s house when she suggested we watch some rom-com she liked that I’d (of course) never seen. We were having a good night, so why not? She pressed play and almost an eternity of hate melted away in minutes. I didn’t care about anything or anyone except for Andie Anderson and Benjamin Barry and if they were going to end up together for the intoxicating hour and 50 (Yes, the movie that got me into rom-coms was How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). At the film’s close, I was a wreck with tears of joy staining my cheeks as the credits rolled. I didn’t stop thinking or talking about it for weeks. How could something so juvenile, so simple, so stupid break my walls, set up camp in my mind and refuse to leave? I was mad at the movie, sure, but I was infuriated at myself. I had deprived myself of seeing love depicted in these far-fetched ways just because they were far-fetched. I had let all those stupid comments from other people drive me away from something as fun as love.
While I’m still not a rom-com-specific cinephile, I can definitely say that I’ve opened my mind to seeing love in real and fictional senses. Now, I let myself fantasize and daydream about these huge epic loves while I listen to a playlist I made on Spotify with songs that I imagine love in the movies feels like. Of course criticisms of rom-coms still stand. But the more I fall into the genre, the more I think that the stories told in rom-coms aren’t meant to seem real. Sure, no one is going to relive your first date over and over again while you struggle with a serious case of short-term memory loss, but that’s the point. You’re meant to feel like you’re floating in a sweet rose-colored dream, and honestly, I think that’s beautiful.