“If you’re a bird then I’m a bird”
Most engaged couples like to get engagement pictures taken to showcase their love and future commitment to one another and many of the times it can be hard to come up with a creative way to take the photos. When doing my personal research on different ideas for engagement photos, I ran across this cute couple who model their entire shoot after the movie “The Notebook.” On their website the couple noted, “We hope that our love endures all that life will throw at us, much like Noah and Allie. Oh, and we always fall asleep hand in hand (reference to the end of the movie)…” This young couple in love inspires to have a relationship just like the characters from the 2004 movie that raked in a total of $115.6 million dollars and still stands at the number 12th spot for highest-grossing romantic drama film of all time. (Statistics taken from The Notebook Wikipedia). With an ever engrossing, bona-fide perfect romance, who wouldn’t want to be like Allie and Noah?
How do we learn to explain love?
The Notebook from beginning to end… for those of you who don’t know already:
The best way to think of the perfect romance is to think about Noah and Allie from The Notebook. These characters fell madly in love over the period of a summer vacation to the point where they knew they were soul mates. Allie moved away at the end of the summer and Noah wrote one letter to her everyday over the span of a year. Allie’s mother hid the letters from her and so Allie moved on and became engaged to another man. She ends up finding her way back to Noah, cheats on her
fiancé and decides to marry Noah. As they get older Allie is diagnosed with a disease that takes away all of her memories and Noah spends every day of his life reading their love story to her to return her memory for the span of a couple of minutes. He explains to his kids that their mother, Allie, is his home and he will never leave her as long as he shall live. The two end up passing away in their sleep together.
Epic Love on the Big Screen
Jake and Melissa Kircher wrote an article in Relevant magazine in which they identified mass media as one way we learn for form our ideals about love and the perfect romance. In their article they state, “ As people consume the media’s view of love, it’s becoming more common for relationships and marriages to be primarily based on a desire for happiness and personal fulfillment. When these feelings fade, people think love is gone and become an emotional train, moving from one lover or spouse to the next… how can real life compete?” The mass media influences the way we think and feel and many have speculated that romantic films and novels have distorted our minds to believe in a fairy-tale romance that is near impossible to achieve in “real life.” One of the effects of this can be people thinking that once the “honeymoon” feelings have come and gone, there is something wrong with their relationship and they move on to a new partner.
Laura Marostica looked into a similar topic in her article in the Deseret Newsspecifically comparing romantic comedies to our expectations
Prime example of love at first sight from the movie “Twilight”
of love. In her article she talks about a study done by researchers that analyzed “40 popular, widely released romantic comedies over the course of 10 years. They coded and analyzed all the romance-related content in the movies” They found that “couples in romantic comedies show behavior that is typical to both the beginning stages of a relationship and the later ones, even if they have only known each other or been involved for a short amount of time. Movie lovers get to have their cake and eat it, too.”
“Just because couples haven’t declared their love after a week doesn’t mean their relationship is doomed. But that doesn’t make the gestures or moments any less desirable to viewers.” What this proves is that people feel pressure to live up to the expectations made in the movies and when their actions and gestures do not compare in real life, relationships suffer.Veronica Hefner wrote her dissertation on “Romantic ideals in popular films and their association with young people’s beliefs about relationships.” She found that there are a few reoccurring themes in romantic comedies some of which are: there is one, and only one soul mate for each person, there is such a thing as love at first sight, love will conquer all and that there is such a thing as a perfect person and romantic partner. Based on these major themes, Hefner conducted a study where she investigated how romantic comedies endorse romantic ideals. She found that “time spent watching all movies (regardless of genre) did significantly predict romantic belief endorsement.”
The four ideals mentioned in Hefner’s study are supported in this famously epic love story and it only reinforces them in our minds. In a refreshing and comedic blog by Leah, she references The Notebook, what it teaches us and how this same story would most happen in real life. She states that The Notebook taught us that “the guy you almost banged when you were 17 will never stop loving you, BONUS: he will be patiently waiting for you to come back to him. In the real world… he moves on… and probably won’t remember you by his 20th birthday.”
Language –> love –> and relationships in real life
Have you ever wondered why a dog is called a dog and a cat is called a cat? Why can’t a cat be a dog or a dog be a cat? We learn to explain objects and emotions by giving them names so we can communicate with others and understand what each other is talking about. Without words we would never be able to explain what we are feeling or what we are seeing and we would be like the cavemen who pointed at objects and made noises to communicate. But what if by giving words to explain our emotions we are actually taking away from the emotion itself and we are robbing ourselves of feelings emotions at all.
What exactly is “Love?”
Labeling love and our reaction
Julia T. Wood draws the connections between communication and our relationships with others in her book Interpersonal Communication: Everyday Encounters. She talks about how language can shape our perception. Basically what this means is that based on how we label things and people determines how we interact with each other. When my boyfriend and I decided to label ourselves a couple, we were able to do things in public that were deemed “appropriate” because we were dating as opposed to if we were not. If we were two friends holding hands and were not an item people would wonder why we were holding hands in the first place but because we are a couple it is appropriate for us to hold hands. The same theory can be applied to labeling emotions. By labeling emotions and announcing how we feel we may act differently than we would had the emotion not been stated. For example: if you are your best friend are hanging out she he/she is mad at you but you have no idea, you will act like normal but as soon as they tell you they are upset with you your mood instantly changes and how you speak and your body language shifts. What is your reaction when someone tells you they love you? Do you soften your face and your tone of voice?
Ideals of love reinforced in our relationships
Wood also talks about the four key factors needed to build and sustain relationships. The four key factors are: investment, commitment, trust and self-disclosure.
- Investment is the time that we spend putting into our relationships with others. An example of investment in romantic love would be a moonlit walk on the beach or a dinner under the stars with a bottle of wine simply talking about anything and everything. In order for the relationship to work this time needs to be thought of as equal between the two individuals involved in the relationship. Investment in an extreme form from The Notebook was shown when Allie moved on with her life because she thought Noah didn’t spend any time thinking about her or missing her when she moved.
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When she thought she was spending more time investing in the relationship she moved on with another man. - Commitment refers to the decision of both individuals to stay in the relationship. This is a choice made by both people involved in the relationship and needs to be a mutual feeling in order for the relationship to survive. Marriage is a good example of a commitment between to people to agree to stay in the relationship for a very long time or even for the end of their time.
- Trust is knowing that you can count on your partner to be there for you for any reason because they care about your personal well-being. I trust that my boyfriend will always be there for me no matter what I do or what I say. I know he cares about my happiness and that it’s important to him. My ideals of trust were slightly influenced when I saw The Notebook for the firs time because I saw how much Noah was willing to sacrifice to make Allie’s dreams come true. He spent his life (when Allie had moved away and was engaged to another man) building the house she always told him she wanted exactly how she wanted it. When Allie returned to Noah, there was no doubt in her mind that he would be willing to do anything to make her happy because she trusted that he cared for her well being. This theme was enhanced when Noah spent every day with Allie reading their love story to her to make her remember who he was for a span of five minutes. Even when Allie didn’t remember who Noah was, she still trusted him enough to read to her and help her around the nursing home.
- Self-disclosure means sharing your most intimate details or not. The more self-disclosure in a relationship the deeper and stronger bond you share. The moments in romantic films when the couple shares their hopes and dreams and talks about their past is a good example of self-disclosure. Think about your own relationships and try to remember a time when you shared the most private information about yourself with someone; you talked about the little details that most people you know don’t know about you. This is a moment of self-disclosure.
In almost all romantic comedies these four components of creating and maintaining relationships are present and fully reinforced. When you get a chance, watch your favorite romance movie and see if you can spot these four ideals. Here is the most famous “rain scene” from The Notebook where Ally and Noah reestablish their commitment to each other and find the passion and self-disclosure they once had.
Click here to view the embedded video.
From relationship to romantic commitment
Wood discusses the difference between building relationships (see above section) and building a romantic commitment. There are three main ideals to have a romantic commitment which are: passion, commitment and intimacy. These three ideals are all interconnected and play off of each other and influence one another.
- Passion are those butterflies you get in a new relationship or the tummy flips when you are kissed or touched by someone you have feelings for. These feelings come and go they are not stable and they are not essential for a relationship to last. This is where most people chose to end a relationship when the passion dies out but this is a natural part of relationships! Don’t worry! The easiest example of passion would be the first embrace with a lover or the first kiss you share or maybe even simply the first time you hold hands. Most romantic films focus on the intense passion between two lovers when they sleep together but that is not the only time when passion occurs. You can feel passion by simply looking at someone you love or being close enough to touch them.
- Commitment (just like in building and maintaining a relationship) is the decision to stay in a relationship. Just like I mentioned above, marriage is a great example of a commitment between two people who have decided to stay in their relationship for a long time or even the rest of their lives.
- Intimacy is the feeling of closeness and tenderness in a relationship. This can be physical or emotional closeness and it’s even better if you have both. Allie and Noah sleep together for the first time when she returns to him which is an example of physical closeness but then they also spend late nights talking about their future together which is an example of emotional closeness.
Real emotions versus Reel emotions
Wood’s descriptions of the essential parts of relationships does not try label what emotions you need to feel to be in love or to know what love is, they do not even tell you what a perfect relationship should look like. She simply explains what is needed in a relationship to make it last over time. Compared to Wood, mass media shows us and tells us exactly what love is supposed to look like, feel like, and be like. When we do not experience the romance we see in movies we think there is something wrong with us or that it’s time to move on to another relationship.
Two birds of a feather
What we all need to keep in mind is that the media is a portrayal of emotions not real emotion. The characters we see on TV and in the cinemas are told what to say and how to act. Their every movement is written for them. We do not have script writers for our lives and we cannot cut a scene to re-do it. We are not told what to feel or how to act we just are. We live our lives experiencing all different types of emotions and we label them to communicate how we
are feeling to others but sometimes we cannot find the right words to fully explain how we feel. By continuing to try to put words to our emotions we limit ourselves and take away from the full expansion of the emotions we feel. “Love,” I believe, is one of those emotions we should try to refrain from labeling and just enjoy the emotion as we feel it. It is a bond you feel with someone else that is unique to each person. Saying “I’m in love” makes your special relationship the same as the couple sitting next to you who is also “in love.”
