Love, actually, is a very serious affair altogether
Doomed for the divorce court, or is it love actually? A recent study from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland claims that romantic comedies set couples unrealistic expectations about relationships
Friday December 19 2008
DID you watch 'Love Actually' on RTE the other night? If you did, and if you enjoyed the wretched thing, if you positively wallowed in it, then chances are you will never find love actually. Sorry to break the bad news.
It turns out that romantic comedies are very bad for your romantic health. A team of researchers from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh studied 40 rom-coms released between 1995 and 2005 and then asked hundreds of people to fill out questionnaires about their attitudes to love and life.
In essence, they have found that rom-com fans are delusional. For example, they believe that you don't really have to tell your beloved what you want because if they're meant for you they should know it without having to be told. This means they are very bad at communicating. Who needs actual words when you have some kind of love-telepathy going on?
The psychologist who headed up the research, Bjarne Holmes, said that rom-com fans not alone believe that their partners should be able to anticipate their every wish before they've even wished it, but that their sex lives should be perfect as well.
He commented: "We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people's minds. The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are still more influenced by media portrayals then we realise." Two questions go unanswered here. Are we talking about a cause or an effect, and are women more prone to this than men? In other words, do rom-coms make their fans unrealistic about love, or were they unrealistic to begin with? It's probably a bit of both.
Now we dive into more dangerous, feminist-infested waters; are women more prone than men to being unrealistic about love? The answer is, almost certainly.
If you doubt this answer then stroll into any bookshop in town. Check out the section with books about relationships and see how many are aimed at women looking for Mr Right, and then look for the ones aimed at men looking to snare Miss Right. You'll find plenty of the former and you'll be lucky to find a single example of the latter.
Also, ask yourselves who goes to rom-coms. If you're a man, and you've seen one, you've almost certainly seen it with a wife or girlfriend. If you're a single woman it's as likely you went along to it with a group of girlfriends. So it's women who are much more likely to be the victims of rom-coms. Census data shows that men and women are delaying getting married. Twenty years ago Irish men were 27 on average getting married and women 24. Now it's 33 and 31 respectively.
The problem is there is no Mr Right. He doesn't exist. Nor does Miss Right for that matter. There is only Mr Sort-of-Right, the one who's close enough.
If you marry someone knowing they're close enough, but not perfect, there is a much better than even chance that your marriage will succeed. The very real and very grim consequence of the rom-com fantasy of Mr Right is that he never comes along and you remain involuntarily single, or else you marry Mr Close-Enough but you've confused him with Mr Right and when you discover your mistake you divorce him.
After that you spend the rest of your life looking for the "real" Mr Right and go through divorce after divorce in the attempt, or else you remain single. But one way or the other you become ever more bitter and disillusioned.
However, men aren't the subject of this column. Rom-coms are, and therefore women are. Rom-coms are all very fine when we know they are really just fantasies and know that life isn't really like that. But if this new study is right, then a lot of people think life is like that. They're the ones storing up trouble for themselves, and for their intended.
Here's a piece of advice; don't buy your girlfriend a rom-com this Christmas. It might be the worst thing you ever did.
dquinn@independent.ie
- David Quinn
