Making the Movies Jealous, Real Love Means More

From the Royal Wedding to movies like Bridesmaids and Something Borrowed and back to classics like My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Runaway Bride, we have been shown what true love and marriage are supposed to look like since the dawn of the movies. But they will never come close to the real thing.

Chick flicks tend to work on a “meet a man, face some kind of conflict with him as you second guess his character and break up, then make up and, most times, get married or engaged” basis. We all crave a good, heart-warming love story and find our fix within these films. But because of these flicks, our standards of real life love have become so high that we may never find what we’re looking for.

The whole Say Anything, John Cusack scenario with him holding up a boombox blasting “In Your Eyes” after a breakup will probably never happen when it comes to a real life guy. The movies have made us expect our men to be knights in shining armor all day every day and so we find ourselves in a fight because he is not romantic enough.

But this is not to say that real life fairytales do not exist. I know we are all completely over the Royal Wedding chatter, but Kate’s story really is one of the closest to come to a movie-esque plot. Hell, they even made a Lifetime movie about Will and Kate.

Just because we cannot expect real life romance to be just like the movies does not mean that we can’t have our own movie scenario. The movies will always put pressure on guys to do something even remotely close in cute-factor, and sometimes they live up to the challenge.

Take Matt and Ginny for example. A new YouTube sensation, Matt successfully played out one of the most tear-jerking proposals I (or anyone else, probably) have ever encountered. Creating a custom movie trailer showing his discussion with her father asking for her hand in marriage and then his trip to the movie theater where she was watching, he was making real life better than any movie I’ve ever seen. The whole thing culminates into the movie theater with him down on one knee, asking for her hand.  He even entitiled the “movie” Making the Movies Jealous because that was what they said on their second date.

I found myself turned into 3 year old child, crying my eyes out while watching her expression when she realizes what is going on. I felt like I was watching a fairytale, even better than all of the chick flicks I have been bred to worship. And then I pinched myself and realized that this was real life. This guy was playing out something even cuter than the movies and the love being shown was actually real. Sure, the movies do their best to present a raw love story full of the real emotions a couple faces when falling love, but they could never show how it really feels, even with all of their cute boombox holding and seemingly unreal scenarios. We may fall into the trap of thinking these made up stories are what real love is all about, but nothing could ever match up to real life love.

There is no way to describe it, but I think it may look a little bit like Matt and Ginny.

Contact the author here: crazycolleen@morningquickie.com