7 Misconceptions About How Love Works That We Need to Leave Behind
Part of what makes love special is the fact that it’s something we each experience privately within our own brains.
In that way, love is sort of like color — how can you be sure that what you’re experiencing is the same as what someone else is?
But whether our love experiences lineup 100% or are merely fairly similar, what seems clear is that many people’s ideas of love come from the way it’s represented in popular culture. The books we read, movies and TV shows we watch, and songs we listen to as we’re growing up help form and shape our ideas of love that we carry into adulthood.
This would be all well and good, except for the fact that pop culture often does a pretty poor job of expressing healthy depictions of love. Rather, it often settles for outdated ones, sensationalized ones, narrow and stereotypical ones, or simply downright toxic ones.
In order to build a better, more realistic, and healthier cultural understanding of love, we’ll need better stories and art made by a broader swath of people in the long run, but in short term, it can at least be helpful to call out some of the lies that pop culture has taught us about love. Here are seven persistent ones:
Lie No. 1: Persistence Is Sexy
Many of the love stories in our culture feature a plot where a man or boy is initially rejected by a woman or girl he’s attracted to.
On a narrative level, this makes a lot of sense: Stories where the protagonist gets what they want immediately simply aren’t as compelling. You want the hero to have to struggle initially in order for his ultimate success to matter.
But this becomes troublesome when it’s cast in a romantic context. All these narratives showing guys getting initially turned down before ultimately winning their crush’s affections imply that this is a realistic and/or desirable approach for real-life love. They imply that when someone says “no” to a guy in a dating context, that’s not the end of the interaction, that it’s just a step on the path to finally getting your yes.
Unfortunately, this has taught many guys that backing off after the first rejection is giving up prematurely, and that persistence and determination will help them win their crush’s affections.
But dealing with a guy who won’t take “no” for an answer is a scary and stressful prospect, particularly for women who might fear the guy becoming angry or even getting violent.
Lie No. 2: Love Is All About Grand Romantic Gestures
Another trope of romantic movies and TV shows is that true love is expressed in a grand romantic gesture.
This can be a variety of things, but the underlying theme is that the most romantic thing you can do for a partner is offer them a gift or an experience that is mind-blowing in its complexity, and the amount of time, effort, and possibly money that it took to pull off.
This, again is visual media having a bias towards things that pop on screen, and away from things that don’t. The grand reveal of an epic gift, the sudden realization of how much Partner A (almost always a guy) has done to express his love for Partner B (almost always a girl) — this is much easier to portray on screen than other forms of love that are just as, if not more, romantic: helping someone through a difficult period, listening to someone when they need to talk, knowing, learning, and intuiting your partner’s wants and needs, and so on and so forth.
While it’s true that a grand romantic gesture can be just that, pop culture seems to have taught some guys that it’s a shortcut to winning as a boyfriend, partner, or husband.
The reality of relationships is that if you don’t have a strong foundation of love and care, flashy gestures or expensive presents will not form the basis of a lasting and meaningful relationship.
Lie No. 3: True Love Means You’re Soulmates
When exploring romantic relationships, too often pop culture leans on the trope of the soulmate.
While the idea that two people are destined to be together can feel romantic, it can also be toxic, justifying people staying in unhealthy or abusive relationships, or deterring them from working to fix a relationship that’s making their partner unhappy.
It’s also a very narrow construction of love, one that completely overlooks the possibility of polyamory, or simply the idea that you can have more than one lasting and meaningful love relationship over the course of a life that will likely span the better part of a century.
It seems much healthier to acknowledge that it’s possible to be truly in love with someone, even for a very long time, without it being a case of destiny, or precluding the possibility of meaningfully loving someone else, either at the same time, or later on.
If your true love can be a true love without necessitating the framework of soulmates, it means it’s OK if things end, but it also means it’s important to put in the work to make sure the relationship remains healthy.
Lie No. 4: Limerence and Love Are the Same Thing
It seems writers love the beginning of a relationship. These periods are filled with physical and emotional passion, and are much more compelling to watch than couples who have been together for many years now, and have figured out how to love each other in a comfortable way that doesn’t necessarily quicken the pulse.
The problem is, while stories about strong feelings people have for someone they don’t know are well worth telling, limerence and new relationship energy are not the only forms of affection or attraction, and mistaking limerence in particular — strong feelings for a stranger — for actual love on screen sometimes causes guys to take their crushes more seriously than they should in real life.
If we had a better cultural understanding of the difference between lies and love, you might have a better shot differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate is to romantic rejection.
Lie No. 5: Romantic Love Is More Important Than Platonic Love
For much of human history, romance as we now understand it did not really exist.
Marriage was not undertaken due to passionate feelings between two people, but for economic and political reasons relating to their families; child rearing was undertaken by communities of people, rather than the parents alone, and as such, much less pressure was placed on the concept of the couple. Of course, people still felt strong passions for each other, but these were not expected to be the center of a person’s life.
Because romantic love can engender such powerful feelings in people then and now, it’s no surprise that we spend so much time telling stories about it. But this can come at the expense of other kinds of stories — ones about friendship, the bonds between family members, and communities acting together.
Movies, TV shows and pop music tend to focus on the journeys and feelings of one or two people, rather than exploring the deep and meaningful fulfillment that can come from connections you have with large groups of people — a friend group, a community, even a small town.
While these stories do exist, their relative absence compared to romantic ones does have an impact. Not spending as much time exploring the importance of these other human bonds helps make it seem like romantic love is the most important of all, which can feel alienating and lonely for people who don’t seek it, or don’t find it.
Lie No. 6: Good Sex Happens Magically Without Work
How many times have you seen two characters in a movie or TV show have sex for the first time?
In real life, this moment is often a meaningful moment in the story of a relationship, but it’s rarely because of the quality of the sex. More often, it’s because it marks the transition from a building sexual tension to the release of it — it confirms their mutual attraction, and opens up a pathway to a more intimate relationship.
However, onscreen, these scenes rarely show first-time sex the way it really is — which is to say, not infrequently awkward.
Good sex is typically a product of people who know each other’s preferences and turnons, which usually only comes about through either trial and error, talking about sex, or both.
The likelihood that two people who don’t know each other very well have mind-blowing, passionate, multiorgasmic sex the first time they hook up is very, very low, but the fact that this isn’t depicted in pop culture means that people get the wrong idea about what their sexual experiences will be like — and are met with disappointment and confusion when things don’t go as expected.
Lie No. 7: Marriage Is the End of the Story
This trope is not one that was invented by contemporary pop culture; religions and belief systems around the world have advocated in support of couples mating for life for a long, long time.
However, alternate arrangements are also not new, and the idea that everyone should always operate according to a lifelong monogamous model is restrictive and increasingly understood to be outdated.
While there can be value in tradition, there’s also value in exploration, and in finding the lifestyle that suits you best. Stories in our culture staging marriage as the ending of the story subtly imply that these relationships are meant to last forever.
But the truth of the matter is that healthy, loving relationships don’t need to last until death in order to be good ones, and sticking it out indefinitely despite the evidence at hand that something is seriously wrong with the relationship can do a lot more harm than good.
We need more stories that recognize the validity of ending relationships once they’ve run their course and moving on amicably to find something that suits each person, and also stories that recognize that a couple getting married may be the end of one part of their story, but it’s only the beginning of the next chapter.
