“I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” I say to my clueless friends, begging them to validate my last-ditch, desperate plan to win over my crush, fuelled by a recent watching of Notting Hill. I regularly quote a hundred different rom-coms and purely non-com cheesy romance movies to my friends, turning every sleepover into an opportunity to binge-watch The Notebook and Bridget Jones Diary, forcing my boyfriend to abandon his pointless action films for a good Sandra Bullock marathon on every date.
People are usually surprised when they discover my obsession with romantic films, and I’m surprised by their surprise and implicit distaste for the same. I soon learnt about the connection people made between being logical or remotely clever and pushing away romantic films as sappy nonsense. Yet, the exchange remains the same: Every time someone says “How can you possibly like this movie?”, I reply, “why not, it makes me feel happy and loved”, and then they reply with the most disgusted look on their face, “you do know that love never really works out that way in real life, don’t you?” and on one hand I want to reply, “yes, I obviously had that figured out” but, on the other, I want to say, “but, it does.”