If our screens and our bookshop displays are united on one thing, it’s that this is the year of the romantic drama. February gave us Netflix’s fizzling and teary One Day, which gave way to Prime Video’s rom-com turned rom-dram The Idea of You (think of a One Direction fanfic come to life with a surprising number of tears). This summer’s It Ends With Us is the first Colleen Hoover adaptation to hit theaters, and if you know anything about Hoover, it’s to expect maximum melodramatic seriousness. Gone are the days of Nicholas Sparks adaptations set in small coastal towns. The new rom-dram is urban, cosmopolitan, and fast-paced. These are careerist adults trying to make sense of their lives before they submit to romance.
The female lead is always self-empowered.
Romance no longer has room for vagabond women who are finding themselves or taking a step back from it all à la Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun. To become a female love interest worthy of unimaginably fantastic amours, they need to be self-starters, if not full-blown small-business women. These characters run their own art galleries (The Idea of You) or are writers (One Day, A Family Affair), florists (It Ends With Us), or chefs (the upcoming We Live in Time). Their professional self-empowerment is intrinsic to the romantic story line because in order to choose whom they want, they have to choose what they want (W-2 versus freelance income) out of life first. Falling in love for the sake of falling in love is out of fashion — and not Feminism 101 enough.
But the male interest is (usually) higher status.
The Idea of You, One Day, and A Family Affair all have semi-famous or notable male love interests — they’re rich and good-looking, they have some access to fame, and they’re all kind of adorable himbos. While none of these stories stems from fan fiction directly, all share similar tropes of an extraordinary man noticing a regular woman for her secret extraordinariness (or, to quote the bards of One Direction, “You don’t know you’re beautiful”). In It Ends With Us, the initial male love interest is a neurosurgeon, while our heroine is a simple florist. This status imbalance leads to a funny “Who, me?”–type humility from the female love interest and requires the male to “humble himself” (eat a sandwich at her house or read a book for once) to become attractive to her. She may be more worldly, introducing him to painters or class privilege, but she’ll always strain to make herself beautiful or elegant enough to tag along until she realizes he likes her for who she already is.
Our female protagonist suffers at least one minor humiliation.
Each of these women endures something ranging from the casually cruel (Solène getting bullied by August Moon groupies for being old in The Idea of You) to the actually cruel (the abuse subplot that propels the conflict in It Ends With Us). The female love interest has to decide if it’s worth overcoming this embarrassment and sorrow and, more important, must consider how good an apology the male love interest is capable of making. This is a classic rom-com trope — someone messing something up before the couple can have their happily ever after — but in these rom-drams, it’s taken to the extreme, often punishing the romantic leads for something out of their control.
Kids get in the way.
With the exception of Ambika Mod’s Emma in One Day, these romantic heroines must cope with motherhood as an obstacle to their self-actualization. Mostly, children are objects preventing the lead’s true happiness. Joey King’s Zara (A Family Affair) launches an all-out assault on her mother, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), for dating her hot Hollywood hunk boss, Chris (Zac Efron). Anne Hathaway’s Solène (The Idea of You) cuts loose her boy-band BF, Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), when she hears her teen daughter is getting bullied at school. In It Ends With Us and We Live in Time, children are weaponized as tearjerker speedruns, intended to drive home the film’s tragedy. These rom-drams want you to know a woman can have it all — be a mother with a career — as long as she’s willing to suffer for it.
They all have a trauma plot.
Speaking of suffering: Dead parents, dead spouses, distant parents, semi-realized childhood trauma — you name it, it’s loaded into these rom-drams like nothing else. Maybe some of these romantic leads are traumatized by past relationships — their parents’ (It Ends With Us) or their own (The Idea of You). Regardless of gender, they have to overcome everything: ageism (Solène and Hayes in The Idea of You), abuse (Lily, Ryle, and Atlas in It Ends With Us), death (Brooke and Chris in A Family Affair, Emma and Dex in One Day), cancer (Almut and Tobias in We Live in Time), their childhood (again: the It Ends With Us crew). The romantic relationships at the center of these stories aren’t about finding true love so much as fixing everything that has gone wrong. It’s not just love; it’s therapy.
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