Romantic Movies Brainwashed Me

Since I was a kid I remember watching every romantic movie starting with Disney classics that probably are not cataloged as romance movies but the whole idea of a prince saving a princess, or the fact the love is just magical came from there.

Growing Up changed to other teen movies like 10 Things I Hate About You, The Princess Diaries, 13 Going 30, a Cinderella story, and so on, it gave a sweet and thoughtful idea of how love seems and how there are gestures that can change everything.

After that phase came the “great love stories”, the all-time favorites: titanic, The Notebook, Pride and Prejudice, Twilight, letter to Juliet, The Best of Me, and How To lose a Guy in Ten Days, I watched those movies at least three times and if we gathered all the information my brain got since I was a kid watching all those movies means I got a non so realistic idea of love and how was supposed to be.

I do believe love is a powerful feeling and it can do wonders, however, there are a lot of grey areas that I didn’t quite understand until I was going through it myself, yes, on the movies there are fights, indifference, and adversities but it isn’t quite as people will react on real life.

If this was a movie you’d be here by now — Taylor Swift

That was exactly how I used to see love in the movies I watched, used to believe if a guy didn’t show me interest, was proud, and didn’t talk to me much, he was Mr. Darcy mysterious, waiting for the right moment to be near me, in secret was thinking of me and with time would fall in love with me, truth is that guy wasn’t into me at all.

The movies where the couple dated and had to break just to find each other a couple of years after were my favorites because they reminded me of my ex, in my mind, this is what was going to happen to us, we would reconnect and everything will be perfect, true love just like ally and Noah or Amanda and Dawson, I believed so much that it happened and yet it led to heartbreak much worse than the first time we break up.

To realize that guys wouldn’t make a grand gesture every time we got into a fight or that we would always understand each other was the biggest eye-opener for me, learning how to deal with a real man with a different point of view than me and recognize when I was wrong, not a fictional man who always knew what to say to make everything go smoothly.

With time I started to watch more realistic movies like 500 Days of Summer, Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, Will Hunting, and Me Before You, with those movies understood that love comes in many ways and made peace with the reality that sometimes people don’t feel the way we feel and that isn’t a bad thing, sometimes what attached us to that person is ourself making all the work in the relationship.

We constantly change our idea of love as we experience it. Doesn’t have the same impact as it did before, a great example of that is sex and the city, back then we all loved Mr. Big, but now we hate his relationship with Carrie it was a blindfold based on the idea of love we have by that time, now we recognize it was toxic and two people going back and forth for each other wasn’t love.

I think romantic movies are so special and to be honest from now and then I watch them after feeling cynical about love just to make myself believe is out there and probably it is. I do want to believe that love with the right person will feel like those movies, just don’t be like me and brainwash yourself thinking it will be like that with every person you meet.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean?

My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence

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