The Relationship Mistake Often Made by Under 30s

I watched a lot of romantic movies when I was younger. Clueless, Four Weddings and a Funeral, When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, to name a few. The list is long yet remarkably similar when you break down the ingredients.

For me, the critical moment is when the two love birds connect after an entire movie’s worth of missed connections and misunderstandings.

They stare into each other’s eyes, and from that moment on, they’re a couple, forever by one another’s side.

The moment is profound, showing the viewer (through a mix of gazes, slow dialogue and passionate kisses) that everything will be different from that point forward.

Their love is instantly deep (even when they’ve hardly spoken — I’m looking at you Sleepless in Seattle), and their commitment will fill a hole within themselves that nothing else could complete. Their new partner will replace friends, family and even their beloved business (terrible precedent — You’ve Got Mail).

From Cher and Josh’s kiss on that staircase to Kathleen Kelly declaring she had hoped it would be Joe Fox, after all, the love projected in these movies is one of fairytale and myth.

It is also, in my opinion, the most dangerous kind of love around— the ‘all-consuming to the exclusion of others’ kind of love. The type where love will fill all the roles in one’s life.

The partner will be the lover, the best friend, the confidant. They will also act as the guide, the mentor and event take care of you when you’re sick.

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When we casually watched these movies as teenagers and then obsessively in our twenties, my friends and I thought this is what we were looking for in real life.

We thought one person could provide everything and so became quick to discard perfectly good partners when they didn’t live up to unrealistic expectations.

When we were under 30, we didn’t realise that a partner could not fulfil us completely. You still need other people and a strong support network to get you through the highs and lows of this crazy world.

You will still need good friends to share a laugh with and your family to help you through the difficulties.

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Girlfriends would fall head over heels for a guy, and it was accepted we wouldn’t see them again for months. Sometimes this lasted for the honeymoon period, but sometimes we lost them for years to a beau. Eventually, the relationship would sour after the intensity, and our friend would reappear, hoping that we hadn’t minded their absence.

I did this myself around age 22. I met a man, and we fell in love. We moved in together after only a month or so, and that’s the way we stayed for about a year.

During that time, I stopped going out as much, stopped calling friends, and stopped confiding in my bestie. I thought I had found love, so all these other relationships were no longer needed.

The pressure this put on my partner was immense and unfair. He would listen to stories about work colleagues, about how rude a girl on the train had been to me, even my thoughts on the Kadashians. He would nod and smile, but, quite rightly, he wasn’t that interested.

These were conversations I should have been having around a table at the pub with friends.

We broke up, not because we didn’t care about each other, but because I was expecting too much of him. There was no way he could fulfil all the roles in my life, and at the time, I thought this was what love meant.

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Movies are just movies. They are stories created to sell tickets and advertising. But when we are young, we often take them as a roadmap for what a relationship should look like. They make us think passion should be like Allie and Noah in The Notebook, or be as dramatically fated as Romeo and Juliette.

Yet, the truth is that perfect love is not love in isolation. It is an addition to an already full life. No lover can truly be our everything. Yes, they are often the missing piece of the puzzle, but they should never be the entire puzzle itself.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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