I have never seen anyone kiss a lover in the pouring rain — in real life, cold rainstorms are no aphrodisiac — but I have witnessed a grown man get down on bended knee and belt out the worst Nickelback cover. His girlfriend, who hates Nickelback, adored it. I was raised by a man who, after a decade of friendship with a woman, got drunk and flew across the country so he could tell her that he couldn’t wait a moment longer to be together. Years later, my mother’s brother was almost arrested for loudly declaiming his regret outside his wife’s window in the middle of the night. (At least he didn’t use a boombox.)
As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann put it, “Showing that one could control one’s passion would be a poor way of showing passion.” I may have made a clown of myself when I showed up out of the blue to declare my love, but nothing else I could have done would have demonstrated the bigness of my feelings more clearly. And I don’t think I would have had the courage to try had I not been bred on a steady diet of finely calibrated melodrama.
Those Hail Mary moments in rom-coms, the porn of courtship, remind us that maudlin embarrassments are often what bring a couple together in the first place. Can these big declarations be stereotypical? Of course — but in the same way all rituals and ceremonies are stereotypical. They provide us with something recognizable. That structure connects us to the many attempts at love fumbled by the millions over the years.
Things turned out OK for me. My corny gesture didn’t go over as badly as I had assumed. In the end, I got the girl — she re-evaluated her reaction, after that initial disastrous moment, because she liked that I was a person capable of such earnest affection. We married. We have gorgeous children. These days, though, our happy ending doesn’t seem as assured as it once did. But it’s not because romantic movies have given us impossible expectations — it’s because a long-term, real-world marriage is hard work, and ongoing, and often we’re too tired to try.
In the challenging moments, however, we have rom-coms. Watching and rewatching on-screen couples’ phony theatrics reminds us of the ways in which our own relationship began. Remembering our origin story — intense, bumbling and yet very real — imbues our middle age with the optimism of our youth. By kicking off our relationship with a rom-com gesture, we ended up giving it a certain durability, taking our romance into an illustrious tradition of other lovers, real and fictional. Sometimes, who you want to be is who others have imagined they were.
