For Boys?
She is super hot and the only girl you truly could end up with. The only girl who you would settle down with. She would love everything about you, but she doesn't really know you exist- until.... the day that she takes a tumble and finds you there to pick her up. You both live happily ever after.
For Girls?
She made you hate her when you started high school and you silently carried a grudge that slowly faded from an all devastating fire that you stoked daily to just a smolder that burns even after you think it has gone out. But then you meet her again at some generic event and realize that together you were stronger than apart. You become lifelong friends.
Yeah I think we all know how the movies are.
But then again, the movies always seem to tell a half-truth that would be magical if it were real. How I yearn for a prince or the thrill of sending the stereotypical bad guys back to where they belong or a bonus where I find love in a partner, equal in all respects, rugged and handsome who helps kick proverbial butt (or real butt as the case may be).
In reality?
For Boys
That girl is married now, to another man. You never had the guts to tell her how you felt, and even if you did, she rejected you. But you are over it now, because you got to get over your strange teenage relationship before you were thirty.
For Girls
You might still be friends, but you aren't really sure- you both would talk casually throughout high school, and then grow apart, but that was it. You are thirty now, and you just added her on the trending social media site, and she accepted immediately and you comment on her photographs every once in a while as she does for you.
The end. No heartwarming stories that give hope for the future of humanity. And even if there are, the media swarms around it and smothers it with reality television (actually, reality television is the sick twisted third cousin of movie magic and involves a whole lot more backstabbing and power tripping than the generic screenplay) and promises of big money and fame.
Since audiences have complained the perfection and excellence that these movies faultily portray, writers now install faults in their characters. Even then, the characters find their way to becoming whole and a fulfilled person in a tidy ninety minutes. Something that makes the idealistic yet unattainable collide with certain aspects of reality, and ultimately enough to make viewers content... for now.
But why were we not content with the perfect couple coming together happily in the first place? Do movies no longer serve as an escape from reality? Why then is this brand of humanity, far inferior to that advertised in feature films leaking into and contaminating the perfection? Why do we allow it- rather why do we demand this insurrection, rebellion from happy days?
I would like to observe that the reason we have called for a new normal to be the norm of our real lives so that we can more easily mesh the happily ever after claimed in the story with our lives.
Would I my life to be like the movies?
I think the best answer to that is that anybody's life can be edited to look like a movie and have a movie ending- so long as they don't stop at the end. So I think no, I would not like my like to be a perfect condensed and crisply packaged movie. I think I actually like those moments in the car on a long drive to a boring destination. I don't want ten years of my life to go by as quickly as an edit where you notice the obvious differences between the actors playing the part. To have your life measured by 90 minutes and stopped halfway, walking into the sunset is not enough for me. I think to live a movie would be to live too fast and far between.
