Name: Why Is Everyone Running In Rom-Coms?
Uploaded: 2025-11-30T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 5 min 20 s
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Adverbs of degree

There are some storytelling tropes that are so cliche that you just know they speak to something deep inside us.

Take this one, the trope that happens at the end of so many romantic comedies,

of someone dashing through an airport, train station, or city street to profess their love to someone else before it's too late.

People, of course, profess their love all the time, though usually it's not so dramatic or kinetic, I should say.

Rvery profession confession of romantic love is dramatic.

It's just that the drama is happening inside.

This trope externalizes those interior fireworks, which is to say, it makes the feeling cinematic.

But, you know, it doesn't really matter if these mad dashes are happening in real life.

The trope isn't so much a reflection of reality as it is a reflection or projection of a deep desire that exists in all of us.

In rom coms, that desire takes the form of true love, but

at its core, it's a desire for meaning, for a meaningful life.

In the modern day, we live in a world without a cosmic moral order, a framework of meaning to which everyone automatically subscribes.

round about the year 1700, give or take a century, that framework started cracking, fragmenting, losing its authority.

And the burden of finding meaning shifted onto individuals.

We all became desperate seekers in a confusing and disjointed world.

It's no coincidence that this shift roughly coincides with the emergence of the novel as a form of storytelling.

In a profoundly new way, the novel concerned itself with individuals, ordinary individuals,

their internal motivations, their inner lives, their ability to overcome obstacles, to achieve a goal.

Novels both reflected and shaped the way modern people saw their identities as narratives, as stories with a beginning, middle, and

As Alistair MacIntyre writes, "The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest."

It's fulfillment, the sense of living a full and meaningful life.

Religion, work, community, charity, art, parenthood.

But around this time, culture, with the help of the novel, invented another way.

One that was theoretically, if not practically, open to romantic love.

Did people feel overwhelming romantic affection before modernity?

"What changes," writes Charles Taylor, "is not that people begin feeling affection for their spouses, but

that these dispositions come to be seen as a crucial part of what makes life worthy and significant.

The other, by being who he or she is, answers a lack...

And this lack is directly to do with self-identity.

In some sense, the flawed individual is made whole."

Or to put that Anthony Giddens quote another way,

And so in the 1800s, there's an explosion of romantic novels, and

in the following century, romantic comedy films.

These films, like those novels, are not always or even usually that sophisticated.

But fantasies of this kind don't have to be to work.

They work because romantic love, this product, this invention of modernity, works.

It can be a strong anchor in a confusing and disjointed world,

a way of feeling psychologically grounded, a way of giving your life real meaning.

But the fantasy is allergic to complexity.

In the fantasy, the goal is simple, singular, and the achievement of that goal is all that matters.

There is just something deeply comforting about seeing people on a quest for love run in straight lines toward meaning that they're absolutely certain of.

There are no lines as we stumble and spiral, haunted by doubt and ambivalence.

And while we all face it, who can begrudge us a few fantasies here and there?

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Why Is Everyone Running In Rom-Coms?

engage

straight

coincidence

sense