According to yet another reported survey, romantic comedy films mess up people’s relationships (Sorry for the blinky over-advertised link destination) by encouraging unrealistic expectations about what “love” is supposed to be. For some people, this causes much distress when their real-life relationships don’t live up to the storybook perfection presented on the page or the screen.

Just one more example of how so many people in this world have a hard time distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

Romance isn’t all about meet-cutes, flowers-and-candy, and the man making excessively public declarations of love in order to make up for being a stereotypical sexist prick who can’t express himself for the previous 70 minutes’ run-time (or however many pages). Neither do these ridiculous public declarations make the female lead’s own unrealistic expectations about relationships, low self-esteem and inability to listen or communicate her actual feelings go away . I’d predict that were these film relationships actually real, most of them would combust before the craft services credit rolled due to the parties’ lack of minimal social skills.

Yes, I understand that these are cute, light comedic entertainments, and these are characters on the screen or page and not representations of real-life experience. However, according to this survey, about half the people surveyed can’t make this distinction.

Is it really that hard to understand that relationships take persistence, communication, patience, and compromise, and all the silly press conference interruptions and marching band accompanied stunts in the world won’t make up for the absence those things?

That doesn’t mean that real-life romantic relationships cannot be or are not fulfilling; it just means that they require work, and in my personal experience, that work is definitely worth putting in.

I am so glad I’m out of the “finding a mate” game. There’s enough of this sort of things affecting people’s non-romantic interpersonal relationships to deal with as it is.

…And in a note tangentially related to past posts, the NY Daily News piece linked above does a not wholly bad (maybe a five-eighths ass) job of actually reporting the methodology and scope of the “survey” it reports on, with minimal fluff; for example, it specifically mentions that the survey was released by (and presumably funded by) a movie studio as part of the promotional campaign for a romantic comedy film.