How many romantic comedies do yo think you’ve watched in the past year? Five, ten, twenty? And aren’t they really the same movie with just different characters? I just watched Made of Honor for the first time and thought the same thing. They’re cute and fun to watch when they come on HBO or OnDemand and when I don’t have anything else to occupy my time with. But these movies are popular and always will be popular and Hollywood will continue to make them and we, women in particular, will continue to eat them up.
According to relationship experts at Heriot Watt University in Edinburg, Scotland, these romantic comedies are bad for our real romantic lives because they give us unrealistic expectations about sex, love and relationships.
Psychologists at the family and personal relationships laboratory at the university studied 40 top box office hits between 1995 and 2005, and identified common themes which they believed were unrealistic.
The university’s Dr Bjarne Holmes said: “Marriage counselors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it. We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people’s minds. The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are still more influenced by media portrayals than we realize.”
No knight in shiny armor? No prince charming to stop us at the altar from marrying the wrong guy? Oh, forget it then!
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