HOW MOVIES MAKE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH LOVE by Farah Khedre Who doesn’t want their love life to be like their favourite romantic movie? It’s always so beautifully complicated but everything seems to work itself out in the end somehow, and who wouldn’t want that? The truth is that this is real life and sadly, real life is never perfect. It’s not scripted to make everything so easily fall into place, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. After watching romantic movies, we so badly feel the need to fall in love in a specific way that we saw on some screen. We try to live out our fantasies as they’ve been shown to us, but these fantasies are bound to fall apart one day because movies have a way of portraying love merely as just many beautifully shot kisses in the rain, razor-sharp dialogues that seem to flow easier than river water and big gestures and meanings to every single moment couples spend together. There is no denying that these things sometimes really do happen in real life and they give any relationship that extra something that makes it wonderful, but they also make us forget that real life has a lot of mundane moments that don’t add or subtract anything from the bigger picture. There are a lot of moments that don’t have a bigger meaning behind them. Movies don’t show these ordinary and sometimes even boring day-to-day routines, because the sole purpose of a movie is to depict a long, detailed and intricate life and divide it into mere moments that are trying to convey the bigger picture. This is why we fail to see the smaller and more genuine picture. Life, with everything in it, including love, even the best kind of love, has a gap in it and we’re all going crazy trying to fill it. We should just stop and accept
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that this gap can’t be filled. It’s this imperfection that makes it all so real and worth living for. We watch movies from beginning to end and think that because our relationship is not where the movie ended then it must not be as good or as real, failing to notice that our relationship’s ending hasn’t even come yet. We’re still halfway through our own movie, so why are we always trying to fast forward and reach the ending? If we start thinking of our life as one of our favourite movies that we’re interested to watch, then we shouldn’t want the end to come so fast, right? We should just enjoy all the tumbles, turns, plot twists, betrayals, loss and love and all that comes in between.
We shouldn’t obsess about the idea of having a perfect partner that we weave in our heads based on a character we’ve seen on screen. We shouldn’t just want love that is quick, delusional, consuming and immersing, but one that is hard, painful and full of compromises. We should want to fall in love with the person we love, because while the moments we have with them and the feelings that they give us might not seem as perfect as the ones we watch and dream about, they are actually happening and are real. And what love can be more beautiful than one that is real and that can even make you lose your mind a little?
