Does Romance in Movies Spoil Our Love Lives?

That's sort of the question this article asked, but it limited itself to romantic comedies. I'm going to toss a bigger question out there - does romance in movies spoil our love lives? Maybe "spoil" is a strong word, but does it make us disappointed in our own love lives because, well, can our love lives every really live up to what we see on the screen?

I addressed this indirectly a long time ago in writing about "The Notebook" as one of the top 15 date movies of all time (I still stand by that claim). But it's something that I was reminded of yesterday when I was watching "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (which, by the way, is not as good as I thought it was going to be). Fine, so Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchet end up having a romantic relationship that fluctuates over the course of the film. But then there's this one scene where he whisks her away for a few weeks/months on his sailboat and they just hang out around the Gulf of Mexico. This is followed by them living for a few weeks/months in a duplex where they just lie around on a mattress and have lots of sex.

That's a freaking awesome life, but what the heck? I get that it's a movie and they can do whatever they want in it, but damned if it didn't make me feel like a loser for: a) not having a sailboat, and b) not having the financial means to allow myself to be mattress-bound for a few months so that I can just have sex all day.

Movies like "The Notebook" though, take things to a whole other level. People see these relationships composed of undying, intense, crazy, passionate love that last lifetimes, with beautiful lead characters knocking boots in exotic locales, of love triumphing over circumstance and time. It makes you crave that sort of thing for yourself, and it makes you convince yourself that you would be dissatisfied with anything less. But does it also manage to ruin the sort of love you can experience in your life by forcing you to have unusually high expectations?

See, a large part of me thinks that these movies don't do anything that we don't already do to ourselves. What I mean, in more verbose form, is that all love, really, is composed of two prime pieces: a) our rational, logical need/desire/decision to "love" someone because we think they're great, and b) our emotions. Rational love can exist without emotional love, and can take you very far, the same way that emotional love can exist without rational love (which is why there's always the possibility that we can fall in love with someone who sucks as a person). Ideally we want to love someone with both types of love, because that's what makes a relationship both exciting and good for you. But the emotional love is the stronger of the two, and that's the one that Hollywood feeds on only because it knows that, at our core, we all want to "feel" a certain way about someone before we concern ourselves with other questions.

Hollywood can show us extravagant things and maybe this makes us want those specific things, like the exotic locales and the endless passionate love-making. But more often than not it just reminds us that we want to feel a certain way about someone, without regard to the specifics of why we actually feel that way. Some people will feel an intense emotional love for someone because of an odd chemical reaction that can't be explained, or a certain type of psychological stimulation that, for some reason, fires just the right sensors ("oh my God I'm so turned on that you like to read"). Ultimately it makes no difference so long as you can feel the way that you want to feel, the way that everyone wants to feel about the person they're with.

So today I'm letting Hollywood and romantic movies off the hook, I'm giving them a break, because they just tell a particular type of story that all of us can relate to. We relate to the stories, as incredible and unbelievable as they might be, not because of an expectation that exactly what we see will happen to us, but only because we all love to love and to be loved. Hollywood reminds us that we should expect and to want to feel that crazy "in love" feeling and that we shouldn't settle for anything less (even as we might also demand more), and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. In fact, I think it's a good thing because all too often people convince themselves that they can get-by without that emotional love simply because someone is "good" for them. But that's bullshit.

Love changes, it evolves and transforms in ways that make it different than it once was (a fact not explored in movies often enough, which is why I'm sort of psyched to see "Revolutionary Road" for that reason), but that's also part of what makes it so exciting. "Evolve" doesn't equal "less passionate" or "mundane." Everything is what you make of it. So go ahead, watch all those damn cheesy romance movies because they're never going to make you expect more for yourself than you already should be expecting.