This story, one of countless "Facebook Love Stories" distributed by hormonal teenagers who apparently "crie evertim" they read the word "love" or "dead" and whose appreciation for the English language is underdeveloped to say the least, represents a fundamental flaw I see in humanity's collective culture. While this is particularly narmy (and without the dramatic reading, almost painful to read), the problem is universal.
The problem is that we, as a species, have no appreciation for subtlety when it comes to love. When we see a couple on screen, if they aren't sucking face they aren't "in love". They're "boring". The best they can hope for is to give the main characters bad advice (old people are exempt from this rule).
They aren't all bad, of course. It's much like the Bechdel Test*, though: it's less a judge of a single movie and more of movies in general. Does the movie intone that one type of love is better than another? That's the problem to which I'm referring.
[[*At least two female characters who have at least one conversation about something other than men or a man. Used as a litmus test of the feminism of movies: do they treat the females as actual characters, or just as accessories to the male lead?]]
Even worse, it seems like we're unable to have any movies without romance. Again, sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's great. But it gets very frustrating when every single movie decides that its lead had to close a scene with a kiss. If there's both a male and a female in the main cast, then it's a forgone conclusion. The last exception, at least the last exception I can currently recall, was Blade. That came out in 1998. It's like, no, I'm trying to get into this story, but you seem to have decided that plot isn't enough.
This also has an annoying tendency to create characters with no purpose other than being romantic partners. This is why chick flicks like When Harry Met Sally do so much better than those like Kate and Leopold: not because of some magical non-chick-flickiness, it's because they're, y'know, good. These characters are absolutely frustrating for me, as a connoisseur of fiction, because they are the epitome of flat characters: they don't even have that one trait that makes a flat character, their only trait is that they exist alongside another character.
Why is this so absolutely awful? Because it means the romance won't work. The characters aren't interesting enough for me to believe that they stand a conversation together, let alone a relationship. Here's my "romantic litmus test", modeled after the Bechdel Test: the characters must have at least one good conversation on a topic other than themselves or each other that would work equally well (A) if they were romantically connected; (B) if they were not romantically connected and had no desire to be; AND (C) if they had already been married for twenty years. That's what I would consider a real conversation.
If you can't fluidly do that, then don't make them romantic leads. It would just be an awkwardly shoehorned subplot. Next time you watch a movie, see if it passes. Again, like the Bechdel test, it does not by itself mean the movie/romance is bad (my favorite movie of all time, Brazil, does not pass). Plenty of wonderful movies failed the Bechdel test, too (Twelve Angry Men, any war movie). The problem arises when you consider how rarely the test works.
It doesn't have to be a romantic movie. The original Bechdel test used Alien as its example, which was hardly a radical feminist statement. It was just a movie which happened to have well-written female characters.
Coming back to the "dramatic romance" part of the rant: that's just simply not how love works. It works because two people can tolerate to be around each other so much that they begin to want to tolerate each other. A date goes smoothly because people have common interests, not because the guy rescued the girl from the enemy ship. I long for a movie that recognizes, yeah, just because we've done something big together doesn't mean we should get married.
Oh yeah, another pet peeve: high school romances end. They end. Maybe 5% of them don't. But if your TV show or movie ends at graduation, then those romantic leads are getting married. That's always bugged me.
Personally, I want a girl who doesn't mind that I'm flipping through Wikipedia while we talk... because she's doing the same thing. Not someone who'd drag me to her friend's birthday party, someone whose friends are interesting enough I'd want to go anyway. "Our Song" would be something with an awesome guitar riff and trippy lyrics, not some sappy pop ballad. In short, the absolute opposite of nearly every rom com I've ever seen.
With the exception that I'd really like her to be hot. Signing out.
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