Everything I know about love I’ve learned watching romcoms backwards. Running away from airports, closing the window on a boy busking in the rain, a woman putting her hair up and her glasses on – these are the lessons I have realised a person needs, lessons in listening to someone when they tell you they’re choosing another life, lessons in boundaries, lessons in comfort and the lies of femininity.
A video went viral last week – a man holding up Love Actually-style inspirational signs to his wife, who was very extremely in labour. He’s always been her “biggest fan” the signs say, and their relationship full of “prayer and patience” and although there have been “rough times” and a lost pregnancy, there’s no test that they can’t overcome together. The feelings you get as you watch the video are shockingly similar to actual labour pains – the same combination of aching horror and existential fear. And it highlighted the danger of another romcom trope, the grand gesture, which turns all focus on to the gesturer, turning the gesturee into an interchangeable object, an audience to their own life.
Another option is to turn the romcom off 15 minutes before the end. Before the car chase of romance in which a man and a woman (they could never be friends because sex exists!) fall into each other’s kiss to the sound of a million violins melting. It’s this trick, stopping at the last ad break, that transforms the classic What Women Want from a saccharine love story into a comic reflection on gender, self and mental illness. Except, who wants to learn from beautiful people?
The problem with romantic comedies is not their tropes, which merely illuminate the issues. It’s that so many obscure the point of the love story, which at its best uses the shadowy terror of loneliness in all its modern iterations to explore the possibility of… being known.
But for all my aged understanding of the value of love and respect and companionship over the quick thrill of romance, the rewound romcom being a cosy reminder, I know its lasting lesson is that there is added value in a love affair that starts with a schtick. The lure of romance retains its tingle, even when it appears inspired by romcoms, rather than the other way round.
Eight years ago my friend Martha wrote a piece for a women’s magazine, challenging her brother, best friend and boss to fix her up on a blind date. Reading it now, it remains utterly charming – there she poses, head tilted, the perfect heroine, beside a line-up of potentials. And reader, she literally married one. Every time I think about it I grin.
As a kind of middle ground between fizzing romance and everyday fondness, I have high hopes for Modern Love, the long-running New York Times column that has been adapted for TV, starring Tina Fey and Anne Hathaway. These are short stories about real relationships – popular columns include one about a woman who used exotic animal-training techniques on her husband, another about a dying dog and the memorable You May Want to Marry My Husband by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who had ovarian cancer. It was a dating profile for her partner of 26 years; days after it was published she died. To dip into the archive, over a decade of stories, is to open time capsules of what love was, and what obsessions we brought to it, and what was acceptable, or possible, or true. While there are fewer airport dashes, the peril is often real, albeit hidden in such places as a loaf of bread.
There is already a podcast, which glamorises the franchise as actors read them as monologues, “stories of love, loss and redemption”, but it manages to retain their next-door-ness, their low yet razor-sharp stakes. In Modern Love, unlike romcoms, the nuance of romance is often articulated through the players’ anxious interactions with technology. This being the huge barrier for the modern Hollywood love story and one that sends producers racing to parodies – with mobile phones nobody is a stranger, communication is constant and intimacy is assumed. I adore the columns for two reasons, which unfortunately appear to be mutually exclusive – their domestic banality and their exoticism. Exotic in that the banal is articulated with honesty we rarely hear from friends, and which I often find myself choking on, as if on an unexpected olive stone.
The glory of the romcom, whether littered with grand set pieces or the scratching reality of pain and boredom, is that it gives strangers’ voices to our deepest desire, which is to know and be known, and then, to make that thirst funny. To coax this fear out on to a screen, to light it beautifully and then let it slip on a banana peel, in part so as not to make us cry forever. Long dismissed, the romcom has suffered many deaths, but written well and watched rebelliously, it not only teaches us the basics of love, but the power of connection. Watched backwards you end with a white girl in a kitchen, wanting more.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman
