What could a new romcom look like?

Are we ready for new love stories?

So Reese Witherspoon is worried that the decline in rom coms is depriving young people of vital emotional education. In an interview on the Dax Shepard* podcast she said that in the past 10-15 years, we’ve seen this massive decline in romcoms - not just movies but TV shows too.

“That when you were 11, 12 and 13, that made you practice, imagine and visualise dating skills… Social media started and then we stopped, we started kind of going romcoms are kind of cringey, but it’s actually where we learned social dynamics.”

The goddess that is relationship therapist Esther Perel agreed on Instagram: “Without those stories to inform us, to allow us to activate our imagination, we are left without the skills we learn from watching those movies.”

She said romantic storytelling - which has been around since the middle ages - has played a big role in our relationship education. “Attraction plus obstacle equals desire,” she said. “And that story of the obstacle is essential to the plot. This is a fantastic set of premises to learn how to approach people, how to tell them what we need… so many essential relational skills.”

Hmm. I admire both these women but I wasn’t aware of having learned ANYTHING helpful from romcoms. I learned that if you were single you were weird, if you didn’t get chosen by the school hottie you were a loser whose storyline could only be redeemed by a late-in-the-day makeover… that all success and happiness depended on being ‘picked’ - and that all women are inherently desperate for a man and all men are secretly terrified of being trapped by us.

Clearly Reese and Esther see it differently. And maybe they have a point. Maybe all the awkwardness we see on screen in old-school romcoms - the embarrassment, the failures, the rejections - maybe that was a kind of emotional education I didn’t know I was getting.

But since having a road to Damascus moment while watching He’s Just Not That Into You and realising OH MY GOD these movies have been filling my head with toxic ideas of what men and women are like, I have not watched romcoms. I replaced them with… er, serial killer dramas. (Is it progress that I’ve swapped girls not asked to the prom to women cut up in supermarket carparks? Answer: no).

The space between stories

Author and spiritual teacher Charles Eisenstein talks about the fact that we’re now in the ‘space between stories’ - the old stories about how to live and work are no longer working, they’re falling apart… but we haven’t found the new stories yet.

We are in the messy middle.

You can see it with the seemingly endless new words springing up about relationships. There’s heterofatalism - the belief that straight relationships are basically doomed. Boy sober - a decision to stop dating men altogether, which in South Korea, forms the basis of the 4B movement (”Four Nos”) - no dating men, no sex with men, no marriage, no childbirth.

There’s a Vogue article doing the rounds at the moment. The headline is: “Is it embarrassing to have a boyfriend now?”

I read it. It was kind of weird, not so much about having a boyfriend itself, but more about how we show our boyfriends on our social media. They used to be a status symbol. Now they are not. Reading it made me feel very old - I had no idea that normal people were thinking about ‘hard launching’ versus ‘soft launching’ boyfriends online. Do they have media advisors telling them this stuff?!

But the headline has inspired people. And I can see why.

For most of my adult life it’s felt to me that a woman’s greatest achievement was to be picked by a man. Without doing that, you might be the greatest thing since sliced bread but on some level there was something wrong with you.

When I was writing Help Me! in 2014, a friend joked that if my self-help experiment didn’t end with a boyfriend readers would be disappointed. It was kind of joke and also not really - that was how most of us saw things back then.

It is SO GORGEOUS that this is changing.

Really. It takes the pressure off a lot of us who for various reasons did not follow that story line. But I also felt quite sad that we have started trashing one of the greatest joys in life: being in love. Meeting someone who you adore and whose skin is delicious and who listens to you and has sex with you and might even do the washing up? It’s gorgeous to have a boyfriend, girlfriend, any friend for that matter.

A lot of the relationship content I read online seems to be a venting of anger and disappointment after years of dating, being messed around and heart-broken. It makes sense that after years of taking crap people are now rebelling and saying NO MORE.

But in the rejection of old ways that don’t work, we are missing out the fact that most humans need to love each other. Yes our friends can do a lot of heavy lifting but for many of us sex and physical touch is really important too.

Can we hold both truths - that our relationship ‘status’ shouldn’t define us AND that love is wonderful? That sex can be bad AND it can be life-enhancing and beautiful? That some people behave badly (including ourselves) AND there are still so many good people out there?

What if this in-between space isn’t just about rejecting what’s not working? What if it’s a chance to dream up what we actually want?

By 2030 it’s predicted that nearly half of women aged 25-44 will be single and without children. Forty per cent of UK adults are already single, fewer women are becoming mothers. We could spend that freedom rebelling against what’s been - or we could be dreaming up new ways of living and loving.

This is already happening as people are finding new ways to build home and family - through friendship, community, and chosen kinship.

In Love Me! I write about women who are marrying themselves in sologamy ceremonies - not as a rejection of partnership, but as a radical act of self-love. People are having children with their best mates. Single mothers are forming “mommunes” to share the costs and care of raising children.

It’s easy to roll our eyes at new terms and ideas but they represent genuine attempts to find something better, healthier, more sustainable.

Could the crumbling of the old romcoms make way not for hours of serial killers but new romcoms?

What might new romcoms look like?

Maybe the new romcoms still include boy meets girl. Maybe it’s also boy meets girl meets another girl and they all move into a lovely house share where they find that living as a three makes rent affordable. Maybe it’s girl doesn’t meet boy but meets sperm donor and has a baby who she raises with her gay best friend and the gay best friend’s mother moves in and they live in an intergenerational family. Maybe it’s people of all genders living together, raising kids together, and nobody’s quite sure what to call it but it works. Maybe gender doesn’t matter at all in the story - it’s just humans connecting. Or maybe your romcom is you, a million miles from other humans, tending your pets and your garden.

It might look like ANYTHING.

So maybe yes, bring back the romcom - but let’s expand the storylines.

So what do we want?

We’re living through a reimagining of relationships: how we live, who we love, and how we experience sex and intimacy. This is messy and confusing… and there is also an opportunity here.

What if we stopped spending so much energy defining ourselves against old models, and instead got curious about what we actually want?

And it’s OK not to know yet. We have spent centuries being drenched in old stories. It takes a lot of time to start to figure out what you want versus what society has told you should want all your life. And it might be that what you want in life is exactly like the old romcom - and that’s great too.

It’s also natural to read about all these new things and to feel tired at the thought of it. Why can’t things be simple like they used to be? Because the way things used to be didn’t work for many.

The space between stories is messy. But if we stay patient, new stories emerge.

And we could still cast Reese as the lead, with a cameo from Esther…

xx

*Dax Shepherd is married to Kristen Bell who is in a new romcom Nobody Wants This which I devoured, partly because it stars the deeply fall-able in loveable Adam Brody. Polly Vernon devoted a newsletter to: Why everyone in the entire world fancies Adam Brody right now THERE ARE MANY REASONS.

This show reminded me despite my dream of having different love stories, I still adore boy meets girl, especially when boy is respectful and kind and sexy and girl is in her forties and they have problems and they kind of figure them out and then they have more problems, but their kisses are electric and their friends and family stay very much on the scene and … well, watch it if you haven’t already. It made me yearn for a rabbi.

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Speaking of sexy and respectful love stories, there are about ten tickets left for the event Anouchka Grose and I are doing in Hackney on 20th November exploring the different ways to live and love. I love that this event is being held in a church. Feels right. Thank you again to Jo at Pages bookshop for the opportunity.

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Also, we are just over half way through The Artist’s Way programme and it has been a joy. I will be doing another one in January, pls email me if you are interested.

Love and thanks for reading.

mx