Camellia Peebles
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Let’s talk about the architecture of romance in cinema and its diverse interpretation of love. I want to start with a confession that will make me sound like the least romantic person alive: I don’t think love is real. Not in the way the movies mean it. I think what we call love is a chemical event dressed up as destiny, a bundle of lust and habit and inherited scripts that we agree to call something holy because the alternative is admitting how much of it we made up.
Rick Sanchez put it more efficiently than I ever could, so I’ll let a cartoon scientist do the heavy lifting: what people call love, he tells his grandson, is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed, one that hits hard and then slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. Break the cycle. Rise above. Focus on science.
He’s not wrong. But he’s not entirely right either, and the gap between those two things is the most interesting real estate in any romance. Because even if love isn’t real, there are versions of it that feel real, and the feeling is the part no chemistry lecture can quite explain away. So instead of ranking the best romances, I want to do something stranger—line up four films that each build a different version of love, watch how they construct it, and see what’s left standing when the construction shows.
Those films are He’s Just Not That Into You, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Promising Young Woman, and Companion. A rom-com, a rom-com in classic romance cinema that hates itself, a revenge film, and a horror movie about a robot. Together, they form a ladder, and every rung is a different lie we tell ourselves about what love is.
He’s Just Not That Into You: Depth With a Dash of Delusion
Start at the bottom, with the gentlest lie: love as a cultural script. He’s Just Not That Into You is remembered as the movie that told a generation of women to stop making excuses for men who don’t call, and its central romance, the one between Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) and the bar-owner Alex (Justin Long), is genuinely the worst thing in it. Alex is, to put it plainly, kind of a dick, and the film spends most of its runtime letting him lecture Gigi about how she misreads male behavior, only to hand her the fairy tale anyway in the last reel when he abruptly discovers he has feelings for her. It’s the exact Hollywood fantasy the rest of the movie claims to be dismantling: the idea that if you just endure enough humiliation, the universe rewards you with the person who kept telling you no. Throw a quirky success story on top, give everyone a bar, a yoga studio, or a real-estate empire, and call it love.
The Bitter Truth
But here’s the thing, and it’s why the film is smarter than its own ending: every other relationship in it is more honest than the one it wants you to root for. The healthiest love in the movie belongs to Beth and Neil, played by Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck, and it has nothing to do with soulmates. It’s about showing up. When she needs him and then tells him to leave, he comes through anyway, not because destiny demands it but because it matters to her, and he decides she’s worth the compromise. That’s not a soul-bond. That’s a choice, repeated.
Meanwhile, the affair storyline shows the other true thing about love: how easily it decays, how ordinary deception is, how you can share a bed with someone for years and never really know them, how simple temptation is for people already halfway out the door.
Even Scarlett Johansson‘s thread shows love mistaken for validation, two people using each other’s attention as a mirror. Strip out the one fairy tale, and He’s Just Not That Into You is a surprisingly clear-eyed movie about love as the stuff we actually do: showing up, lying, and looking for someone to reflect us back to ourselves. The script we’re taught is the least true thing in it.
My Best Friend’s Wedding: Well, Now I Want You More
Climb one rung, and the lie gets sharper: love as ownership. My Best Friend’s Wedding is built on a premise that should set off alarms immediately. Julianne (Julia Roberts) and Michael (Dermot Mulroney) made a pact that if neither of them was married by twenty-eight, they’d marry each other, which raises the obvious question the movie is smart enough to know you’re asking: if they were so perfect for each other, why weren’t they ever together? The answer is that Julianne never actually wanted him until he was gone. She thinks his phone call means it’s finally their time; instead he’s calling to say he’s engaged to Kimberly (Cameron Diaz,) whose father, naturally, is a billionaire who owns the White Sox, because these movies cannot imagine love in a world with money problems. And the instant Michael becomes unavailable, Julianne’s want switches to “ready to marry” like a light.
If I Can’t Have You…
That’s the tell. Her love isn’t love; it’s ownership panic, the sudden conviction that a prize she’d mentally reserved is being taken. So she does genuinely reprehensible things: tries to break them up, turns them against each other, humiliates Kimberly at karaoke. And the movie, to its enormous credit, refuses to reward her for it. We’re conditioned to expect Michael to choose Julia Roberts because she’s the star, she’s the protagonist, the whole grammar of the genre says the lead gets the guy.
My Best Friend’s Wedding makes her an anti-protagonist instead, the lead you’re rooting for and appalled by at once, and then it lets Michael choose his wife. Because Michael is not a prize for completing the quest. Having feelings for someone does not make them yours. The uncomfortable question the film leaves under its bright nineties surface, its karaoke and its rehearsal-dinner rendition of I Say a Little Prayer, is this: if your love requires another person to stop choosing their own happiness, is it love, or is it just possession wearing love’s dress? The grace note is that the couple forgives Julianne in the end, which is more mercy than she earned, and more than most of us would give.
Promising Young Woman: Because Some Love Can Vanish Forever
Now the ground shifts. Promising Young Woman is where the ladder stops being about romance at all, and where the only genuinely real love in these four films finally appears, wearing the least romantic face imaginable. Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is a failure by the logic of every movie above her. She dropped out of med school, she works in a coffee shop, she has no bar, no yoga studio, and no billionaire. But her ruin has a source: her best friend Nina was assaulted, humiliated, disbelieved, and driven to suicide while everyone around them fretted about the futures of the promising young men who did it. Were we ever going to talk about Nina’s future? Cassie’s whole life has narrowed to that question. She is the anti-protagonist you actually love because her rage is the correct response to a world that decided her friend was disposable.
People Are Inherently Selfish
And then the film does something cruel and brilliant: it offers her a romance. Ryan (Bo Burnham) is charming, funny, disarming, and for a while, the movie lets you believe in him the way it lets Cassie believe, dangling the possibility that maybe love is the thing that saves her. Then she learns Ryan was there. He watched what happened to Nina. When she confronts him, he doesn’t crumble into remorse; he explodes, and he reaches for the cruelest thing available, which is to call her a failure, a woman who works in a coffee shop instead of becoming a doctor. And the most devastating detail is her reaction: she laughs. She isn’t surprised. She isn’t even heartbroken, because some part of her was always braced for exactly this, so certain that the men and the love would fail her that the confirmation lands almost like relief. The romance was a construct the film assembled specifically so it could detonate it in front of you.
What’s left, after the romance is exposed as a trap, is Cassie’s love for Nina, and it is the strongest love in any film I’m describing here precisely because it can never be returned. Nina is gone. There is no reconciliation waiting, no healing conversation, no version where love fixes anything. So the love becomes loyalty, and then anger, and then justice, and finally identity, a monument Cassie builds to a dead woman that slowly becomes the prison she lives in. Her fatal mistake is believing she’s untouchable, that she can keep taking dangerous men home to teach them lessons without ever being in real danger herself. At the bachelor party, she gets it wrong, and a man overpowers her and kills her, and she ends up exactly where Nina ended.
But she knew. She’d scheduled the message that would damn them, because she went in understanding this could be the end, that she was trading her life for her friend’s memory. That is devotion past the edge of self-preservation, love with no strings and no conditions and no possibility of reward, and it is the only love in these movies that the film treats as unambiguously real. It also kills her. The version of love that isn’t a construct turns out to be the one that costs everything.
Companion: Love on Demand
Which brings us to the top of the ladder, and the movie that says the quiet part out loud: Companion, in which love is literally programming. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is devoted to her boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), remembers meeting him in a grocery store, would do anything for him, and does not know she is a machine or that the grocery store never happened. Her love was installed. Every tender thing she feels is a setting. This is not, whatever the marketing implied, a new idea; we have always manufactured love through arranged marriages, inherited scripts, and the slow machinery of proximity.
Companion just makes it literal and dares you to draw the line. If you could adjust a partner’s personality and looks like sliders on a phone, dialing warmth up and independence down, at what point does the thing they feel stop being love? At what point does the thing they are start being a person?
Can Chemistry be Manufactured?
The film answers by breaking its own machine. Iris only comes apart when Josh’s control does, when a jailbroken directive forces her into violence and the whole scheme, a plan to make her kill so Josh and his friends can steal a dead man’s money, collapses into a night of bodies. And the moment Iris raises her own intelligence to full and becomes genuinely conscious, she becomes impossible to command. You cannot force love on a mind. You cannot force anything on a mind.
That’s the whole terror and the whole point: the instant there’s a real consciousness inside the manufactured thing, the manufacturing fails, because a conscious being can refuse. Even Patrick (Lukas Gage), the other companion, the one I keep thinking about, loves his partner Eli (Harvey Guillén) in a way nobody programmed and nobody can quite switch off, a genuine feeling that surfaced inside a purchased body and became the lever that frees him. Manufactured love can’t survive contact with an actual mind. It either isn’t love, or it stops obeying the second it becomes love.
It’s Chemistry and Connection, Not Magic
So here is where the ladder leaves me, and it isn’t quite where Rick Sanchez stands, though I understand the appeal of his stool at the bar. He’s right that love is a chemical, a script, a habit, a construct, that if you take any of these films apart, you find gears where the magic was supposed to be. Gigi’s fairy tale is a lie. Julianne’s devotion is possession. Cassie’s love is grief that curdled into a weapon. Iris’s adoration is a setting someone else adjusted. None of it, examined closely, is the transcendent unconditional thing the poems promised. Love, in the cold light, isn’t real.
And yet. The feeling can’t be faked, and it can’t be forced, and that turns out to be the one durable fact in all of this. You cannot install real love in Iris; it only appears when she’s free enough to choose it or refuse it. You cannot command it out of Patrick; it survives every reset. You could not have manufactured what Cassie felt for Nina if you tried, and no script could have produced the thing between Beth and Neil that makes one of them show up when the other says, “Don’t bother.”
The construct is everywhere, and standing atop it, refusing to be programmed, forced, or reduced to chemistry, is a feeling that behaves suspiciously like the real thing precisely because nobody could make it happen on purpose. That’s my honest answer to why we believe the stories we call love. Not because the stories are true. Because underneath all of them is a feeling we can’t build, can’t fake, and can’t command, and a feeling like that is the closest thing to real we’re going to get.
