I can routinely be found talking to myself on the island opposite the one where all the people with the Correct Opinions about a movie go. In December last year, I called The Roses (2025), the Benedict Cumberbatch-Olivia Colman starrer, a ‘feel good’ movie on the internet and summoned keyboard warriors all over my comments section. To be fair, the protagonists, who start off as career-crossed lovers passionately supportive of each other’s ambitions, do try to kill each other at some point. But I hadn’t yet fathomed how strange it was that watching couples being dysfunctional and downright despicable to each other is not everyone’s version of ‘feel good’.
I have since investigated what makes movies that serve as cautionary tales of what not to do in love so utterly satisfying for me, only to arrive at the conclusion that, deranged as they may be, they make me feel better about my own relationship.
Eight years ago, I walked into love as a starry-eyed 19-year-old, genuinely believing that I, A Perfect Person, had found the only Other Perfect Person in the world. For a few years, my partner and I shone under this delusion until the cracks of our normal selves started poking through this false foundation. For two otherwise-smart people, neither of us could grasp the most obvious truth: nobody is perfect. And that no matter how otherworldly the love, a healthy relationship doesn’t necessitate the absence of issues. The realisation sent me down a spiral. I felt shame in admitting it to my friends to whom I’d sold my perfect story. As a romance author, I couldn’t hang my head low and admit that real love wasn’t all I was promised.
Not by my partner, no, but by every movie I watched growing up, yearning for it.
I came of romance-appropriate age with Nora Ephron’s rom-coms with their biting wit, empowered heroines and wrapped-up-in-a-bow endings. Imtiaz Ali’s screenplays assured me on lonely nights that I would find a perfect match for my exact kind of eccentric. Karan Johar’s family dramas prepared me for the struggle to come in getting my family to sign off on my choice of partner, but assured me they’d come around in the end. All my life, the cinema I consumed deemed finding love as the natural conclusion point; that when the credits roll after the final kiss, nothing could go wrong anymore because you had finally happened upon what remains elusive to most.
In reality, it’s like being sold a car without being primed to maintain it. What kind of fuel does it run on? What the hell is mileage? If the leather chips or the windshield cracks, do I just throw it out and get a new one? Movies tasked with initiating generations into romance failed to teach us this maintenance: the never-ending and mildly frustrating, humdrum task of keeping a relationship’s health in the green zone. Money woes, infidelity, fluctuating libidos, annoying in-laws—where are the sappy romance movies that show the couples kissing their way through unsexy issues? What even are the solutions to intractable problems except breaking up and finding someone better?
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
