Are Romantic Movies Ruining Relationships?

Melanie Kane
3 min readOct 10, 2022

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Have you ever fantasized about dating women in movies?

Don’t be shy. Many of us have wondered what it’s like to be in movies. We can’t help it, movies are like magnets. They allow us to escape reality and imagine a world that fulfills our desires.

Movies play a vital role in shaping our perceptions of reality, especially with our dating beliefs and stereotypes. In romantic films, idealized love scenarios cause unrealistic expectations, creating a somewhat wrong idea of relationships.

For more context, here’s the distinction between movie love and real love:

Falling in love too quickly

Movies: It’s always love at first sight.

Many fictional couples start with love at first sight. The moment they meet each other, they will instantly feel fireworks and no day will pass without them thinking about each other.

Reality: Exaggerated romantic movies can make you believe that if you don’t feel love the moment you meet someone, they’re not for you. As a result, you’ll miss the chance of knowing them better.

True love takes effort and time. It differs from attraction in which the dilemma of love at first sight is commonly based. In reality, you have to deeply know someone and be comfortable with them before you can tell whether you love them or not.

There’s always excitement

Movies: Have you noticed how movie couples always do extraordinary things? Take the movie Romeo and Juliet as an example.

Both immediately fell in love and even planned to get married the day after they met. This does not happen in real life, and it shouldn’t. You can’t just marry a stranger because you fell in love with them at first sight.

Reality: There will be boring days.

In the real world, not all relationships experience exciting or challenging moments all the time. There are times when you and your partner will just sleep in bed all day or lounge around watching movies.

You will also have surface-level conversations and even feel less connected at times, and that’s perfectly normal.

Many couples expect their relationships to be as exciting and adventurous as the ones in the movies. This disillusionment can cause them to believe that they are in a boring relationship, prompting them to leave their partners.

Money isn’t an issue

Movies: In movies, we frequently see couples dining at fancy restaurants, living in massive mansions, and even driving multi-million dollar cars. Unless one of the themes is poverty, the characters seem to not care about how they spend their money.

Reality: In reality, finances affect relationships. Money is even one of the common reasons why couples argue. You have to budget your money and know when and where to spend it to avoid financial downfall. You can’t just go to Paris because you want to. You need to think about how smartly you spend your savings.

Real Relationships Aren’t Like the Movies

Movies are meant to depict different sides of reality, but they are twisted to make them more entertaining. Simply put, love movies are romanticized in all kinds of ways to hook us into watching them.

Most of these movies are mere products of imaginations, and they distort our analysis of how love and relationships should be. So, it can potentially damage our relationships with our partners if we continue to imagine a world that’s not even real.

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Melanie Kane

I’m passionate about helping people find deep, emotional connections through 1stchoicedating.com/welcome