The hidden wisdom of rom-coms
Hello to everyone who is new to Hey, You but not new to my email list. This is our new space! I hope you’ve got your brew handy! If you have no idea what I’m talking about because you missed last week’s email, you can catch up here. Okay, ready? Let’s talk about the hidden wisdom of rom-coms…
I’ve got a theory about rom-coms, or romance in general, that they’re not just a bit of a fun story about a person meeting another person and falling in love.
I reckon they actually contain one of the secrets of life. A bold statement, I know, but this is why.
To be a romance, yes, there needs to be two people who fall in love, but there also needs to be a HEA - otherwise known as a happily ever after or a happy for now.
If there’s no HEA, it’s a love story and not a romance. Important distinction.
Well, you might think, that’s what makes romances so trite.
In life, there are no happily ever afters. There is just life with all its challenges and changeability.
And you’re right. But I want to propose that the HEA is actually at the heart of the hidden wisdom of rom-coms and all romances because…
…in a romance, we already know that the two people are going to end up together. It’s a given. That’s the genre.
So why do we even bother reading or watching a romance if we already know the ending?
Because we want to know how it happens. We want to know how these two people get together, how obstacles get in their way and how they overcome them.
It’s all about the how. Not the what or the when.
Right, okay, so what?
I think this is very compelling - this focus is on the how.
Let’s unpack this a little.
I’ve spent most of my life focused on the what and its close cousin, the when.
It begins with, I really want this thing to happen. Then it’s quickly followed by what do I need to do to make this happen and when is it going to happen and why isn’t it happening, now, like right now, already! That means it’s never going to happen!
It can be a rapid, downward spiral.
But I feel like there’s a different possibility when we focus on the how.
It begins with, I really want this thing to happen. But then instead of spiralling downwards, we can stay curious and open. I wonder how things are going to play out. I wonder how we’ll get there from here. I wonder how I can best show up.
There’s more trust and possibility and potential when we focus on the how.
Now, you might have a sceptical part of you piping up who’s saying, yeah but you don’t know if it’s going to happen at all. It may never happen! Huh!
That’s true. But the truth is also that something will happen. We just don’t know what it is yet.
And if we focus on the how, there’s less chance of spiralling into the what and when and missing the wonder of the how.
Because there’s another important element of a rom-com that helps here.
In any romance, the characters don’t know that they are going to get their person. They don’t know the ending of their own story because they are so caught up in the what and the when.
But we as the reader know. We know. You know.
This distinction between the characters in the book not knowing but us knowing is mirrored within our inner world.
In our inner world, we have our Self, our true essence, who does know and we have Parts of us who don’t know. [Check out the background to this here].
We’ve all had the feeling, haven’t we, where deep, deep down we know something? We know it deep within us.
But then we’ve all had the experience where we’ve questioned or doubted or worried despite that deep knowing, haven’t we?
What’s going on?
Our Self knows - that’s the feeling deep down. But our Parts question, doubt or worry.
Our Self focuses on the how and our Parts focus on the what and when.
So the romance genre is actually bringing us back to our deeper wisdom.
When we read or watch a romance, we know what’s going to happen so we focus on the how even when the characters are focused on the what and when.
Here’s the potential:
When we live our lives, we can stay connected to our deeper knowing by focusing on the how even if our Parts are focused on the what and when.
I’ve been exploring this lately and I can tell you that focusing on the how is so much better than always wrangling with the what or when.
So there you go: the hidden wisdom of rom-coms. If you ever needed an excuse to read and watch more of them, there you have it.