Romantic comedy as cultural training data

The meet-cute is the genre's opening move. Two strangers collide in a way that is improbable, mildly humiliating, and immediately memorable. The audience learns that real love begins with a story you can tell at a dinner party. The downstream effect is that relationships beginning in non-story ways, swiped on an app, introduced by a coworker, met at a colleague's wedding, feel narratively weak to the participants. They are missing the opening scene. People underrate these relationships, sometimes leave them, in pursuit of a partnership with a better origin story. The meet-cute teaches that the start of love is supposed to be memorable. In actual life, the start of durable love is usually unmemorable, which is fine, but the training data has not made it fine.

The genre requires an obstacle. Two people who simply meet, like each other, and pair off have no movie. So the obstacle is inserted: a class difference, a parental veto, a fiance, a job in another city, a misunderstanding. The audience learns that love is proved by what it overcomes. In real relationships, the absence of dramatic obstacles is often a sign of compatibility, not of weakness. But the trained viewer reads the absence as missing data and may manufacture obstacles, conflicts, dramas, breakups-and-reconciliations, to generate the proof the genre taught them to look for. The genre has, in this way, taught a generation to confuse drama with love.

Most rom-com plots run on a third-act misunderstanding that could be cleared up in thirty seconds of honest conversation. The genre needs the misunderstanding to delay the resolution. The audience absorbs the lesson that communication failure is a normal feature of romantic life and that romance can survive it. In real life, communication failure is often the primary load-bearing problem in a couple, and treating it as a charming plot device costs relationships. Couples raised on the corpus often interpret their own communication breakdowns as the dramatic third-act of their love story rather than as the routine dysfunction that needs work.

The chase through the airport, the public proposal, the boombox under the window, the speech at the wedding. The genre rewards the grand gesture. The audience learns that love is demonstrated by occasional extraordinary acts. The cost of this lesson is the underrating of ordinary acts, the daily showing-up, the unglamorous reliability that is the actual substance of a long bond. Couples raised on the corpus may withhold ordinary effort in favor of saving up for the grand gesture, or feel cheated when their partner provides the ordinary and not the grand. The grand gesture, in real life, is usually a one-time event in a relationship whose foundation was built on the ordinary. The genre inverts this.

The genre needs a climax. The climax is usually a single moment of heightened emotion, a kiss, a confession, a recognition. The audience learns that love has a peak, a turning point, a scene that defines it. Real love does not have a peak. It has long stretches of moderate emotional weather, occasionally interrupted by intense moments that are not, individually, the relationship. The trained viewer looks for the peak, dates the relationship's reality from the peak, and is disoriented when long stretches of life provide no peaks. They begin to suspect the relationship is not real because it has stopped peaking.

The genre ends with the formation of the couple. The implied wedding, the smile, the kiss, the cut to black. The audience learns that the story is the courtship and that the marriage is the curtain call. There is no rom-com about year seven of a marriage. The genre has no training data for what comes after the wedding, which means the audience has no training data for it. They enter long partnerships with detailed knowledge of how to meet, woo, and propose, and no knowledge of how to stay. The genre's silence on the second half of the love story is one of its quietest and most consequential omissions.

Maryann Erigha and others have documented the long whiteness of the Hollywood rom-com. The corpus that taught the West how to love was, for most of its history, a corpus about white people loving each other. The audience absorbed not just romantic conventions but racial defaults, who is imaginable as a romantic lead, whose love story is worth telling, whose interracial pairing is treated as story-worthy and whose is treated as exotic. The recent decade has produced more diversified rom-coms, but the back catalogue is what trained the bulk of the current adult population. The downstream effects on dating preferences, mate-selection patterns, and racial assortativity in partnership are real.

The genre's protagonists tend to be middle and upper-middle class. They live in apartments that no person their age could actually afford in the cities the films are set in. They have flexible jobs in publishing, magazine writing, design, gallery management. The genre teaches that romance happens in a particular socioeconomic register and that working-class romance is either invisible or a setting for a story that escapes the class. The working-class viewer absorbs the lesson that real love happens elsewhere, in lives that look like the films.

The genre's gender script: man pursues, woman is pursued. Man initiates, woman responds. Man is fixed by love, woman is completed by it. Both halves of the script are limiting. Men trained on the script feel obligated to pursue even when they would rather be pursued, to initiate even when they would rather respond, to be the active romantic agent even when they are tired. Women trained on the script feel obligated to receive, to wait, to be the prize. Variations and subversions exist but the corpus's central tendency remains the older pattern, and the training effect compounds across films.

The rom-com lovers are usually in their late twenties or early thirties. The genre rarely treats romance in the fifties, the sixties, the seventies as a central subject. The audience absorbs the lesson that romance is a young person's project. Older audiences who fall in love anyway often feel like they are doing something the genre did not script, and the older partner is often surprised to find themselves the protagonist of a story the genre did not anticipate. The training has aged the audience out of its own romantic possibilities.

The genre cannot show the texture of decade-long companionship. It cannot show the conversation at year fifteen about whether to move closer to aging parents. It cannot show the small daily mercies of a partner who knows you have had a bad week. It cannot show the negotiation of sexual frequency in year twenty. It cannot show the death of one partner and the surviving partner's grief. These are the materials of love at scale, and the genre has no apparatus for them because they do not produce the emotional beats the form requires. The audience trained on the genre has no images for these stages and must improvise, often poorly.

The collective task is to produce new training data. This means fiction, film, and television that show the parts of love the rom-com cannot show. It also means cultural rituals, community stories, and family lore that fill in what the screen cannot. The grandmother's account of her marriage, the divorced uncle's account of his, the older friend's account of long companionship, all of these are training data that historically supplemented the screen and that have, in atomized cultures, atrophied. Rebuilding the supplementary corpus is part of the work. The genre will continue to exist and to produce its meet-cutes. The job is to refuse to let it be the only training data we have.

1. Jeffers McDonald, Tamar. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 2. Jeffers McDonald, Tamar, ed. Falling in Love Again: Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. 3. Erigha, Maryann. The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry. New York: NYU Press, 2019. 4. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 5. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. 6. Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage, 2010. 7. Fisher, Helen. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. 8. Jeffers McDonald, Tamar. Hollywood Catwalk: Exploring Costume and Transformation in American Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. 9. Erigha, Maryann. "Race, Gender, Hollywood: Representation in Cultural Production and Digital Media's Potential for Change." Sociology Compass 9, no. 1 (2015): 78-89. 10. Fisher, Helen. Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. 11. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. 12. Cherlin, Andrew J. "The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage." Journal of Marriage and Family 66, no. 4 (November 2004): 848-861.