If you’re single this Valentine’s Day, your plans may look similar to mine: cheap champagne, fuzzy blankets, and a long night watching your favorite romantic movies with your friends. But as my roommates and I brainstormed a list of the best movies for our marathon, I couldn’t help but realize that for one reason or another, I hated almost every last one that we could come up with. As adorable as rom-coms seem on the surface, they often revolve around problematic perceptions of healthy love and how to achieve it.
To start, the entire premise of almost every romantic comedy is the relentless quest for love. Rom-com protagonists need love and validation from someone of the opposite sex in order to be content with their lives. If a character is unhappy with their love life at the beginning of the movie, the problem is virtually never resolved by the character becoming secure with themselves and enjoying their own company; rather, by the end, they find their “other half” without ever learning that they can be whole themselves.
The clearest example of this is the romantic sitcom How I Met Your Mother. The series’ protagonist, Ted, spends every episode searching for a lover or wondering if his current girlfriend will be “the one” to make him complete. But this trope is rampant in all sorts of romantic films too, such as The Princess Bride. The message is clear: there is nothing worse than a broken heart, and the only way to recover from a broken heart is to glue it back together with a romantic partner, new or old. According to these tropes, healing on one’s own is not only undesirable, but impossible.
Perhaps even more problematic than the general plot are the lengths that characters will go to achieve this soul-saving love. Many rom-coms feature the persistent pursuit of a female character, despite clear signals that she is not interested in the man who’s chasing her. Male protagonists assume that “no means yes” and that their love interest enjoys their advances anyways. They may be called out for their behavior, but by the end of the movie, they often end up with the girls they had their eyes on. This further reinforces the idea that if a man continues to force his affections upon a woman, she will eventually give in and confess her love in return.
For example, The Breakfast Club includes a scene where bad-boy John Bender hides under the desk of good-girl Claire and looks up her skirt with her knowledge, but without her consent. Though Claire chastises him for doing so, she and Bender are an unofficial couple by the end of the movie, providing the impression that it’s not only acceptable, but actually rewarding to push a woman’s sexual boundaries.
Perhaps the movie Hitch best summed up the way that many male characters are written in rom-coms, when protagonist Alex Hitchens declares, “…a beautiful woman doesn’t know what she wants until she sees it. That’s where I come in. My job is to open her eyes.” These characters have a deluded worldview; not only do they pursue a woman for their own pleasure, but also because they think they are responsible for somehow rescuing or liberating her.
This trope of a man’s duty to “save” women is made even more obvious in films where a powerful male character helps to straighten out a woman’s life. The final scene in Pretty Woman, for example, shows business mogul Edward climbing up former prostitute Vivian’s apartment building as the knight to save her from her financial woes and lowly profession.
Similarly, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, down-to-earth Paul picks up Holly as she exits jail. Holly doesn’t call a cab of her own or walk down the block on confident feet; rather, Paul picks her up, creating a metaphor that he is her ride to a better, more stable life that she couldn’t have created on her own. Evidently, female characters in rom-coms are frequently portrayed as clueless as to what male characters think they really want or need. Instead, they must rely on a man’s so-called bravery and selflessness to get them out of difficult situations.
In some cases, rom-com protagonists even engage in relational behaviors that are outright toxic. But rather than being portrayed as the creepy, aggressive, or manipulative characters they are, they are made out to be sensitive, caring young men who know what they want and have the courage to get it.
In There’s Something About Mary, Ted literally hires a private investigator to gain information about the private life of an attractive woman whom he barely knows. Lloyd, the main character of Say Anything, arrives at his love interest Diane’s house after their breakup, blasting their special song on his boombox. Evidently, rom-coms make it seem as though crossing boundaries in the name of love is not only normal, but something to be appreciated.
In some ways, I can respect rom-com protagonists’ fierce emotions for one individual and for the concept of love. But to achieve the high level of Hollywood drama, these characters often take it too far, leaving audiences with unrealistic expectations about what true love looks like. It’s not that we should remove these movies from our watch lists, but we should see them for what they are: fictional stories interwoven with some exaggerated and often problematic themes. So this Valentine’s Day, be sure to have these thoughts in mind when you turn on your favorite comfort flicks.