10 things I hate about Tinder: Why watching rom-coms is so cathartic in the midst of romantic turmoil

Over the summer, Greta Gerwig’s powder-pink phenomenon Barbie took the general public for piddling fools. We went in excited about the prospect of seeing Ryan Gosling with a tan, all the while blissfully unaware of the introspection that was to follow. Regardless, it was not this unprecedented turn of events that proved most perturbing in my case. Rather, I was preoccupied with the frightening accuracy of Gerwig’s ‘depression barbie’ who is described as wearing sweatpants all day and night and is watching the BBC adaption of Pride and Prejudice for the seventh time.

This resemblance to my friends and I was scarily uncanny. Chilling in a too-close-for-comfort kind of way, as if we had been found out. My best friend and I have historically used Pride and Prejudice as a code; if she sends me a picture of her watching it, for want of a better word, shit has well and truly hit the fan. It’s our very own, very sophisticated enigma. Collectively, our romantic pursuits traditionally wind up with a few discernible characteristics: a more to “share” bag of Maltesers, either the 1995 BBC series of Pride and Prejudice or the 2005 film directed by Joe Wright, and (naturally) a migraine.

So, what is it about watching a rom-com or a romantic film in the midst of some romantic turmoil that is so profoundly cathartic?

What constitutes the majority of the genre’s catharsis appears to be its serene contradiction to most of our romantic pursuits in our late teens and early twenties. These films present this demystified form of love that helps to alleviate the stress and heartbreak of doing mental gymnastics 24/7 about why somebody ghosted you or why your situationship isn’t progressing any further.

Mark Darcy wouldn’t make you google ‘What does it mean if somebody is sending you mixed signals?’ Dolly Alderton’s Agony Aunt column in The Times would quite literally cease to exist if everyone was as good-natured and unassuming as Hugh Grant’s floppy-haired, bookshop owner, William Thacker.

In truth, my mildly ostentatious, though self-aware self must admit that film is not always required to be abstract and sophisticated. It does not always have to be Pulp Fiction this, Taxi Driver that. Sometimes the essence or message of a film can be straightforward, as opposed to presenting itself to us as some kind of a cipher. Romantic comedies show us the most tender and wholesome kind of love plainly and simply in a way that just isn’t offered to everybody in their late teens and early twenties, or on Tinder for that matter.

Simplicity is the key to its appeal. If I’m going through a breakup quite literally the last thing I want to watch is some mind-bending Shutter Island-esque Scorsese extravaganza. I’ll gladly stick to When Harry Met Sally and my box of Kleenex, thanks.

Rom-coms have offered us a scintillating glimmer of hope for our own dating lives yet simultaneously dimmed the lights in the room that houses our wildest expectations. This stark contrast between the fairy tale and our own lives dangles romance in front of us 20-something singletons like a carrot before a donkey. Regardless, many of us are hooked on the genre and its saccharine sentiments like we’ve got love morphine on a drip. They feel good and there is categorically nothing burdensome about watching a Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks meet cute.

Often, we associate rom-coms with the grandiose tale of romance and the gushing declaration at the centre of the film and forget the more realistic yet equally heart-warming subplots. The genius of screenwriters like Richard Curtis is that interwoven in all of these fantastical tales of love, exists glimpses of an altogether more understated and in many ways more human display of devotion. Curtis’s Notting Hill and Four Weddings and A Funeral provide the best examples of this. In the latter, peripheral character Matthew recites the poem Stop All the Clocks by WH Auden, to declare at his partner Gareth’s funeral that he “was my North, South, my East and West. My working week and my Sunday rest.”

I’m not saying every romantic comedy is going to be rotten tomatoes certified fresh but, in any case, I don’t necessarily think that is necessarily their objective.

The allure of the genre is that it both gives us a more realistic representation of human connection to savour but equally something altogether more extravagant to marvel, or at the very least laugh, at. They can be somewhat unrealistic (an understatement) but that is exactly the point. Cynic or not, we’d all like a Colin Firth to tell us “I like you very much, just as you are” or a Heath Ledger to sing Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ to us complete with a marching band.