If you're looking for a sympathetic ear, or worse, sage relationship advice from romantic comedies, well, they're just not that into you.
It seems that the ideas commonly put forth by such movies -- a singular soul mate; deception in the name of desire; flashy, eloquent declarations of love -- can lead many to unrealistic expectations for their own love lives, say researchers in Scotland.
"We have this idea that out of 6 1/2 billion people, we're somehow going to meet our predestined soul mate, who happens to live in the same neighborhood or work in the same place. I love how that always happens," says psychologist Bjarne M. Holmes, of Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University, about a common film plot point. But in real life "people sometimes spend 10 years going through a series of relationships that, if they had put time and energy into, might have actually gone somewhere instead of having this prior idea of what they're expecting."
In the study, recently published in the journal Communication Quarterly, Holmes and fellow researcher Kimberly Johnson selected 40 top-grossing romantic comedies released from 1995 to 2005 -- including such titles as "What Women Want" and "You've Got Mail" -- and analyzed their content, cataloging each scene of romantic action such as gift-giving, kissing, declarations of love, weddings, involvement with exes and even acts of deception in the pursuit of love.
"What we found is that some of these same themes that our relationship counselor colleagues tell us they hear over and over seem to be perpetuated," he says. Though he was careful to note this doesn't in itself determine whether the genre is causing destructive behavior found in real relationships, or is reflecting it, or both.
Holmes' ongoing research also includes a study of nearly 300 college students that establishes a correlation between the preference for such entertainments and the students' curdled concepts about love.
"We're basically finding that people who prefer romantic comedies are more likely to buy into notions of predestined soul mates, [to believe] that men and women are very different in relationships -- which, if you go into 30 years of study in relationship science, that's usually not the case -- and that it's a good idea to try to read your partner's mind" rather than communicate, Holmes said by phone from Scotland.
