FollowI suppose we are just too in love with love. Too in love with the idea that it is simple to fall so deeply and indelibly in love with someone, that our minds are incapable of focusing our attention anywhere else. Too in love with the possibility that we can meet someone amazing in a bookstore or a cafe, and simultaneously experience the torment and contentment that comes with meeting a person that we cannot help but want to be around all the time.
It is near impossible not to desire this type of serendipitous love when the media portrays it so vividly, and worse yet, so frequently. We are consumed by the idea that if we twiddle our thumbs and hope for the best, the universe will reward us hopeless romantics with a flawless script for a fairytale story and a fairytale ending.
But this, plainly put, is just not the case.
It is a hard truth to swallow, as we commonly hope for everything in our lives, from good grades to impressive jobs, to love, to be delivered to us on a silver platter upon our request; and in actuality, some fortunate souls find that what they want is precisely what they get. As for the rest of us, we realize that those people are the outliers, and in truth the silver platter is a pipe dream; what we want is not at all as easily accessible as hors devours at a swanky dinner party.
Life is not a romantic comedy. The dating process is not written out in a step-by-step “how-to” that we can buy in the self-help section of Barnes & Nobles. We cannot follow the path that the make-believe characters in “The Holiday” or “He’s Just Not That Into You” take in order to find their true loves. Though yes, it would simplify our thought process if everything from the meet cute, to the fall out, to the perfect happy-ending, was all formulaic; that if we follow rules A and B, then it will yield C, and C will undoubtedly make us happy. We may fool ourselves to think that a cinematic love is what we strive for, but it is a relief that in reality there is no cookie cutter program for love. Real love is unabridged, so we take the bad with the good to gain a unique experience that is unaltered, unedited, and unscripted.
We should realize that love is a palpable thing for all of us, but the feelings we experience when we watch a love story are not the feelings we experience for an actual human being. We can fabricate what love feels like all we want; we can live vicariously through Noah and Ally’s eyes, but putting our own mind into a make-believe scenario is not love, it is infatuation with media-represented love.
Sure, movies do a great job of portraying a particular kind of love. Romantic comedies would not be such a popular genre to us viewers if we did not think that they would give us some degree of gratification. I love a charming romantic comedy as much as the next person (I admit, I’ve seen “The Holiday” more times than I can count… Jude Law, people. Jude. Law.), but I have learned that we cannot continually place ourselves in fictional narratives when the best kind of romantic narrative exists beyond our Netflix and Blu-Ray players.
We are in love with love, and that is okay, as long as we also realize that true love is so much more than just someone else’s story, and there is no way cinematic love could even parallel how it really feels to love another person. In its purest form, love is the most authentic emotion of our human experience, and to truly treasure it as much as we are able to, somehow we need to release it from the reins of a cleverly concocted fantasy. How? Well I think we are all still figuring that one out, and that is what makes it all the more exciting.
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