A recent poll in Australia shows that watching romantic comedies can ruin your love life because it raises your expectations and makes you want flowers and candy for no reason at all. In other news, grass is green and babies are cute.
Researchers polled 1,000 Australians to see if watching romantic comedies affected their romantic relationships. The results are hardly shocking. The reason behind the poll is unintelligible. Are researchers running out of things to study in Australia? Yes, the poll showed that the inevitable happy endings that take place in romantic comedies like The Notebook and 27 Dresses lead to unrealistic expectations, such as expecting flowers “just because” or believing that your partner should know what your thinking at all times without you having to tell them but who needed a poll to tell them that? The one thing researchers didn’t reveal is if gender played a role in this poll. Half of the thousand people polled thought romantic comedies inflicted disaster on real life relationships. Polls are done randomly but one would think that researchers would try to get a fairly even split of males and females to poll to reflect the larger population. Were the roughly 500 people in the poll who resented romantic comedies all female or was resentment towards movies like The Wedding Planner equally split gender-wise?
The fact that someone felt the urgent need to poll people to figure out that romantic comedies result in unrealistic romantic dreams is ridiculous. What’s even more hilarious is that the study was released by Warner Home Video at the same time the studio’s romantic comedy Valentine’s Day was released on video. Why release a study showing that people think movies like Valentine’s Day ruin their romantic lives while trying to promote a movie that is full of schmaltzy, ooey-gooey romantic plotlines? What marketing genius thought that up? Perhaps it was an attempt at reverse psychology. Hey, did you know that romantic comedies will raise your expectations and damage your relationships? But, um, watch our romantic comedy anyways, please.
These poll results should be taken with a grain of salt. I mean, can you picture life without romantic comedies? I can, and it’s an ugly, disappointing world. Life without Richard Gere sweeping Julia Roberts off her feet is a life not worth living. Besides, even if we all stopped watching romantic comedies we would still be subjected to unrealistic romantic stories. Romantic comedies are not the world’s only source of romantic overindulgence. The idea that Prince Charming will sweep us off our feet starts at an early age and builds as we grow older. Unrealistic fairy-tale endings exist in Disney movies, children’s books, romance novels, TV shows and songs. In order to avoid all happy endings you would have to go live in a cave without any traces of the outside world.
What this poll really shows us is that half the population of Australia (and probably the rest of the world too) allow themselves to be brainwashed by romantic comedies and then blame those movies for their own unrealistic expectations. Avoiding impractical love stories will not heal your relationship if it is already broken, nor will it change your personality, or your romantic hopes and dreams. This poll also demonstrates that half the people polled are able to watch Sleeping Beauty, read a Nicholas Sparks novel or listen to a Taylor Swift song without letting it warp their romantic expectations.
For the record, I love quality romantic comedies. I saw Valentine’s Day and I liked it. Was it predictable and a tad sappy? Of course. But it was also charming, light-hearted, funny and full of romantic gestures, which is all I really expect out of romantic comedies. I do not ask romantic comedies to save the world from aliens or stop global warming. I do not expect rom-coms, as they are known in the biz, to have all the answers. Romantic comedies rarely disappoint me because I know what I am getting into when I sit down in the movie theatre. The fact that romantic comedies like Valentine’s Day are usually chockfull of yummy looking men that act all romantic and say beautifully scripted things doesn’t hurt either.
If nothing else, romantic comedies are worth watching because of the rare time a rom-com turns out to be funny, moving and unpredictable. The good romantic comedies give us a few laughs, the great romantic comedies usually prompt a few tears and the best romantic comedies help us realize what we really want out of our relationships. If those movies happen to raise our expectations it is only because we are letting them.
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