“People [would throw] pebbles at my window in the middle of the night to wake me up and tell me nice, sweet things,” says St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School math teacher, Mr. Cortez. To many, this may sound like the iconic scene from the 1989 Romantic Comedy, Say Anything, where John Cusack stands in front of his ex-girlfriend’s house and holds a giant boombox over his head, a grand romantic gesture to win her back. However, this was the reality of how many high school students made an effort to see their significant other before new online forms of communication started. Nowadays, you can just text a person to strike up a conversation if you want to talk to them. Although less romantic, this is our unfortunate reality.
While this was a romantic gesture Mr. Cortez received, when an anonymous boy at SSSAS was asked what was the most romantic gesture he’d ever received, he replied, “when a girl wanted to make out with me.” These two responses are both answers to the same question, which may come as a surprise, but the difference between these two stories is an outlook to how romance has changed over the years.
Because of access to phones and texting nowadays, romance is lacking face-to-face interactions. In most cases, to actually date someone, you need to first be in the “talking stage,” which almost always begins over text. An anonymous girl student at SSSAS says, “People nowadays with talking stages [over text], and this and that, aren’t going to come up to your door and bring you flowers.” Maybe real-life romance never looked just like a Rom-Com, but now phones are only taking us further away from it. Instead of getting rocks thrown at your bedroom window, now you just receive a text.
According to Art History and Yearbook teacher at SSSAS, Mrs. Sandoval, it’s not just the introduction of online communication that’s different, but she’s observed a difference in interactions at school as well. She says that the separation between boys and girls in class and during lunch stands out as something that’s changed from when she was in high school. She says that even when she first started working at SSSAS, flirting was more obvious among students but that she rarely notices it at all now, if ever. Not only this, but public displays of affection, like handholding at school, were totally normalized when Mrs. Sandoval was in high school. Now, such affection seems forbidden because students fear judgment from their peers. Mr. Cortez says that he’s observed that at school dances, no one dances with someone, but that everyone dances together. He notices a lack of “personal investment,” he says that he wonders if this is because it is too risky, and that our generation seems tentative towards that, a difference from past generations. Mrs. Sandoval even questioned, “Do kids even go on real dates anymore?”
In an interview with famous actress Reese Witherspoon on Page Six (A news entertainment source about celebrity gossip), she explained that it is so apparent that this generation socializes differently from past generations. Her take on this was the fact that maybe the decline in production of rom-coms has something to do with it. In the past 15 years, there have been fewer and fewer rom-coms coming out in theaters, and even “big movie stars [not] being in rom-coms.” This could be because of the rise of social media substituting television. Social media captured this idea that rom-coms were cringy and that there was better entertainment out there. However, Reese hinted that rom-coms “are where we [her generation] learned social dynamics.” Everyone always knows the ending of a rom-com; the main character ends up with the person they’ve been chasing, but the plot always differs. What’s helpful about this is that depending on the rom-com, the audience can see themself in the characters, “and imagine and visualize dating skills.” For instance, let’s say you were scared to ask someone out, but so is your favorite character in this movie you are watching. By watching the character model, you can figure out what to do in this situation on your own.
Witty banter has also been less apparent. Nothing can compare to the banter between characters like Andie Anderson and Benjamin Barry in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, or Harry Burns and Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally, but people nowadays struggle to simply hold a conversation over the phone. Although this might not all be because we don’t have TV shows or Rom-Coms produced like this anymore, we still don’t have anything like this to look up to. Instead, we have social media to rely on, which could end up confusing people who are trying to look for romantic advice.
Chivalry was dead a long time ago, but now, due to phones, romance is dead too.
