We’ve all watched classic romantic comedies and I’m sure we all walked away feeling incredibly hopeful about what was to come in our love lives. But will it actually come? I’m not so sure. Before, we spent our weekends watching “When Harry Met Sally,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” and so many more — movies that wrecked us and then put us back together again.
What do we have to hold onto now? Remakes.
Today, we’re left with watered-down replicas of the films we once cherished. We know the jock will fall in love with the girl in glasses, the love of your life will be the person you never expected and as always, the best love is the forbidden one. The truth is that these ideas weren't taken from our favorite classic rom-coms, a lot of these tropes we have of love actually come from Shakespeare, such as “Romeo and Juliet,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” This leaves us wondering much about the creativity of the future, but that's another topic of conversation we'll dig into next time.
After all this talk about whether romantic comedies are still alive, what about romance?
Thanks to these movies raising us, we grew up believing we’d meet our partner when they accidentally spill coffee on us, walk past each other on a busy street or we’d drop our books in the hallway and we both stop to pick them up, our hands touch, we look up, our eyes lock, they smile and say, “I love this book. Can I borrow it?”…you know the rest. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to happen that often.
When we do meet people, it's usually through dating apps and it stops feeling natural; or meeting someone in the street may be great until we're too scared that they're a secret killer. Dating in 2026 feels like a game of chess: don't respond too fast, don't text first or, why the hell are they liking that picture? Let's not forget we start comparing ourselves to others since we have access to absolutely everything.
It's as if we have been set up for failure.
Is that the case or have rom-coms distorted our expectations on love? It is possible that we have trained ourselves to only recognize romance in a very specific form. In reality, love might look quieter than that. Maybe it’s someone remembering how you take your coffee, sitting with you through a bad day or sending you a text just to make sure you got home safe. It may not feel like a scene from a movie, but perhaps, that doesn’t make it any less real.
Romantic comedies may have shaped how we imagine love, but they were never meant to serve as instructions for it. Stories from Shakespeare to Hollywood were written to entertain us, to exaggerate emotion and coincidence in ways that real life rarely does. Yet somewhere along the way we began treating those moments as expectations rather than fiction. Love in reality is rarely as perfectly timed or as dramatic as the stories we grew up watching, but that may be exactly what makes it more genuine.