Did Rom-Coms F*** Me Up? (I’m Seriously Asking)

By Atlanta screenwriter, actor, and filmmaker, Madison Hatfield.

Photo by Everton Vila on Unsplash

I want to start by saying that I love romantic comedy. Rom-coms are my favorite stories to watch, my favorite stories to read, and my favorite stories to write. I will defend this genre with my LIFE against anyone who dares call it artistically inferior to any other narrative flavor. So if you have come here to read an epic takedown of the form, this is not the essay you’re looking for. But if you’re interested in witnessing a millennial divorcée spiral about the impact of romantic fiction on her romantic proclivities in her very non-fictional life…I beseech you to read on.

I feel like it’s important to mention early (and boy, I bet you can’t guess what I’m going to say next) that I am not religious. My relationship with faith stopped pretty much at baptism, and I was a baby at the time and thus do not remember it. I do remember going to a youth group a few times in high school because I had a crush on a boy, and if you don’t know me already, you’ll soon discover THAT TRACKS. But I mention the loose grip any notion of God has on me because it puts me in an ideal position to find meaning in my life elsewhere. There has been extensive philosophizing on the general swapping out of “romantic love” for “God” in Western cultures (for a brief but solid rundown on this, check out this Medium article). It’s a bit of an over-simplification, but the broad strokes idea is that these two paradigms sit on opposite ends of a see-saw: as Christianity had less and less of an influence on Western society, romantic love began to have more and more. Thus far, that see-saw hasn’t really had its weights shifted in a long time, and we find ourselves in a society unabashedly preoccupied with the notion of romantic love. Which brings me to…the romantic comedy.

Romantic comedies are our most grounded form of low-fantasy storytelling. We as the audience know intellectually that we’re watching something that is too convenient to be true and yet (as with some kinds of dystopian sci-fi or speculative fiction), there’s that emotional tug of, “Well, it could happen.” Or, even more specifically: “It could happen to me.” The romantic comedy, for me personally, is the ultimate comfort. I know the ending. The element of surprise is not why I’m watching it. I’m watching it to see the story beats I know and love play out in the hands of characters that delight me. Certain romantic comedies can fail for the same reasons many other stories do: stilted dialogue, flat characters, over-emphasis on plot gimmicks. But a GOOD romantic comedy is a GREAT story, and we’ll often find romantic subplots in action/adventure epics, mysteries, thrillers, legal dramas…you name it. Writers do this because they are smart and they know the grip romance has on us at a cultural and often individual level. It is perhaps the most pervasive strategy we as a species utilize to achieve a feeling of “completeness” in our lives, and many writers have come to discover that a story is not complete without it either.

But it is that search for “completeness” that leads me to my (hopefully) click-baity title. There was certainly a time in my life where I judged my sense of wholeness on whether or not (or how successfully) I was partnered. Without the fundamental belief that I am placed here for a purpose by an all-knowing God, it’s on me to seek that sense of purpose elsewhere. Maybe I’m pre-wired for it or maybe I watched Bridget Jones’s Diary too young, but I have historically sought that meaning in my relationships with other people, romantic or otherwise. And I’m not alone in that. We as humans have a few tried and true ways of finding purpose in order to grapple with the mystery and randomness of our own existence: the pursuit of money, fame, technological advancement, and love. Of these, love is perhaps the least exploitative choice. It doesn’t involve the mining of rare earth minerals, so…there’s that. I guess what I’m getting at here is that romantic comedies didn’t invent the notion that our lives are meaningless and empty without our One True Love, but they for sure haven’t hindered the chokehold that mindset has on our culture at large. And I know personally they deepened my resolve to make myself “lovable” in the hopes that I might find that One True Love as soon as possible. Because my life wouldn’t be complete without it.

And I did find it. Early. Successfully. I was married at 23 years old to a man I absolutely adored, who came to me through a love story worthy of writing down. I felt so lucky, like I had truly been chosen for something that I wasn’t necessarily owed. But that made it feel fragile. I spent the first half of my marriage feeling like I was one false step away from losing it all. Because I didn’t love myself before falling in love with someone else, I couldn’t conceive of the idea that my husband was as attached to me as I was to him. And therefore much of my mental and emotional energy went into the same crap I was doing before marriage: making myself “lovable,” keeping my needs small and my conflicts smaller. And none of this came from my partner at all. I was truly putting MYSELF in this mental anguish because—again—I had not bothered to learn how to love myself. In my defense, women in Western cultures aren’t exactly given an education on that from ANY of the systems in place…but I digress. Eventually, the stress of feeling expendable even in my marriage became too much to bear, and I got myself into therapy. There, I began receiving the education on self-love that society never gave me, and after years of growth and transformation two things became clear almost simultaneously: I finally loved myself, and I no longer loved being married to my husband.

As much as I adore rom-coms, that affinity didn’t stop me from asking for a divorce when it was time to do so. And that means rom-coms didn’t brainwash me so fully that I was unable find a sense of completeness in myself. I live an independent life and I’m pleased to report that most days I feel whole as hell. But if I’m honest with myself, one of the hardest things to stomach losing in my divorce was the love story I’d felt so proud of. I do think that might be a rom-com problem. And now that it’s been over a year of me living on my own, walking through the world with a sense of romantic possibility again, I am reminded of the claws that rom-com storytelling has in me. Every interaction is infused with meet-cute energy: the man I met in dance class the day my divorce was finalized; the old friend also going through a separation that I’m suddenly seeing in a new light; the TV actor I approached in public thinking he was someone I knew in real life. My brain takes in the information from these moments and immediately starts telling me a story, and not just any story. My brain is constantly writing romantic comedies for me.

This in and of itself doesn’t seem like a problem, per se. But as time goes on and evidence of incompatibility piles up and reality sets in, something in me is reluctant to give up the hope of a good story. Something in me makes me discount time and evidence and reality in favor of keeping the rom-com going, and ultimately that is kind of fucked up. If I wasn’t such a scholar of romantic comedies—if I wasn’t a WRITER of romantic comedies—maybe I could disentangle myself from these narrative traps more easily. But I am devoted to this genre. And maybe that’s okay. Our brains are adapted to identify patterns, and if mine is attuned to the beats of a rom-com…there are worse patterns to identify. There are worse ways to confront the randomness of existence. Maybe, with more time and therapy, I’ll stop trying to make narrative sense of my life and let these romantic mysteries unfold without my mental maneuvering. But for now, I’ll accept that this is a part of me. If I love myself like I say I do, I have to make peace with my habits—even the ones that work hard to take my peace from me. And on the days when that’s most difficult, I can take care of myself with a good meal, a hot shower, and a rom-com of my choosing.

Maybe they fuck me up, but they fix me just as often. And isn’t that what stories are for?