RomComs – Romantic Porn
We are increasingly hearing about how abysmal porn is for people’s fundamental ideas about sex. While they’re well-founded suggestions, I would like to present another side of the media’s impact on relationships:
Romantic Comedies.
Many would reach the consensus that RomComs, while cringe-worthy and same-y, are innocuous. They hurt nobody, present no ill-witted ideas, and tell a sickeningly sweet, feel-good storyline that is easily digestible. However, I argue that they do have a sub-conscious effect on the expectations people hold in terms of love, romance, and getting their own ‘happily ever-after’ with the man or woman who just won’t give up on them.
Love is hard. Love is something largely misunderstood, and hard to perceive the same way from person to person. It is never a linear feeling, and no-one feels it or expresses it in the same way to another. What love isn’t is someone running after you in an airport; or turning up at your doorstep on Christmas Eve to show you massive cue cards, encouraging you to cheat on your fiancé; or even a marriage of convenience to amend your own violations to your Visa terms blossoming into true love. Among these extreme examples, movies with a plot driven by a relationship are littered with fairy-tale moments that easily embed themselves into the watcher’s brain, leaving them waiting for the moment that it happens to them.
And maybe that moment does come — but it won’t last forever. Movies and TV shows focused around a budding relationship seem to permeate the idea that some people, having found true love, have also found eternal happiness and moments filled with utter excitement and compassion. Again… wrong.
Anyone looking at anyone as an individual or as a couple can see that life is filled with mundanity, and banal times. While you have some fantastic experiences in life (I would hope) not every second or minute of anyone’s life is considerably magical. You forget whole days or months, they were just that uninspiring and unimportant to the grand scheme of things. In movies and books, every line, every scene, matters, as it is a whole lifetime condensed down to ninety minutes, or three-hundred pages. If you multiply this out to the characters’ whole lifetime, it seems every moment is emotionally moving and significant.
When people realise that, after consuming so much romantically based content (which is something we can’t avoid, producers have decided that it does make for a good storyline), their lives and connections with others don’t match up with the protagonist’s, they become disappointed. They are always looking for their next moment of clarity, of joy, but it seldom comes in the way they expect it to. People, ultimately, are quite simple and boring. No-one can provide media-level drama at all times; we become bored with the natural human condition.
While you and your friends will have a good laugh, or you and your significant other may share a profound moment of love and appreciation, life will not always provide this. We must live from day to day, accepting that we have to bridge the gaps between the deep lows and the elated highs with perceivably ‘unsatisfactory’ moments.
Just as sex is not as smooth, glamorous, and even ‘sexy’ as porn portrays, life is not as awe-inspiring, stimulating, and dramatic as the media portrays it as for the bounteous profits to be made from the feel-good factor.
