Jaimi Bratby thought love would look like it did in the movies: a slow motion hallway glance, a love confession in the rain, a happily ever after. At 16, she waited, year after year for her own version of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before to unfold. But instead of romantic love letters and fairytale endings, she got the awkward group dates and half-read messages on Snapchat.
“It feels like my fault, maybe there is something wrong with me,” she says. “I guess maybe I’m just not the main character, I’m not meant to fall in love.”
Romantic Ideals
It always begins the same way. Lockers clang shut, a dreamy pop song underscores the moment two teens join hands for the first time, a story of inevitable love. In a heartbeat, the chaos of the world slips away. For generations, film has offered us a version of young love: slow motion, golden-lit and sealed with a kiss. A scene recycled across decades. To a generation of audiences, it is more than just fiction – it is a blueprint.
In cinemas, a chorus of hearts half-healed gather in the dark, humming along to a melody they once knew. Each beat a quiet echo of their own first heartache, first kiss, first shattering. Some sit still, hearts cradled gently in their chests, hoping for their turn, awaiting their moment. As if the screen might blink and beckon, as if the story might pause and whisper, now you. They sit in silence, faces aglow with the light of young love blooming on screen.
“They make you feel, and not just the boring kind, they make it look easy and perfect,” Jaimi shares. From 10 Things I Hate About You, to The Kissing Booth and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, filmmakers thrive on an idealised version of young love. But what happens when teenagers realise real life isn’t scripted, love isn’t magic, happily ever afters are hard to find?
Teen cinema delivers an often unattainable version of young love. Each scene serving as a stepping stone toward finding the “one and only” or “soul mate”. Two communications experts, Christine Bachen and Eva Illouz, explore this phenomenon in their research Imagining Romance: Young Peoples Cultural Models of Romance and Love where they interviewed more than 180 children.
The study finds that more than 90 per cent of the young people in their studies “looked to movies to form their perceptions and expectations for romantic love.”
At 16, Jaimi has never been kissed. She isn’t secretive about it, though she wonders if it will ever happen for her. There is a slight longing in her voice. She talks about love like a film she hasn’t been cast in yet.
“After watching To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before almost two thousand times,” which is obviously an exaggeration, “I thought I could manifest that type of love into my life,” she says
Her exaggeration reflects the reality of teenage love that do not tend to stay still. It dances through decades: from secret notes passed in class to late night texts glowing beneath the covers. Each generation redefines what it means to fall in love at 16. In the 1930s, adolescent love appeared in musicals featuring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, stories steeped in innocence. By the 1940s and 50s, the adolescent became the teenager. Sweet romances played out alongside gritty teen delinquent dramas, revealing a culture in the midst of transformation.
“Hollywood shifts with culture, by making more films about and for teenager’s post-war years in the United States,” says Dr Djoymi Baker, Senior Lecturer in Media and Cinema Studies at RMIT University.
In the 1950s, love was instant, all-consuming and flawless. Teen romance in films does not only shape emotions, but creates atmosphere: the curated soundtrack, the tidy resolutions. Love looks clean and easy in these stories.
“Anything less feels like failure,” Jaimi says.
Hoping fantasy might link up with reality, her voice trails off, and for a second, it’s clear: she is still waiting for that meet cute moment, a love without consequences.
The Consequences of Cinematic Love
Romantic montages and soft-focus kisses shape a generation as it grows; the reality of love by comparison, often feels like a letdown. On screen, the boy always has a way with words, the girl never has acne, breakups mean a montage, not a mess. No one talks about the jealousy, the ugly, the unfair.
“I grew up expecting teenage love to be super mature, sexy and deep but most experiences for myself and my friends were simply nice or a bit awkward,” says Sacha Paterson.
At 25, she now learns to read films not just as stories, but as texts. To catch what others miss, an eye trained not just to watch movies but read them – frame by frame, metaphor by metaphor. She often dwells on “why fights never lasted more than one scene,” why they were neatly resolved before the next cut, as if heart ache could be edited out with a good soundtrack and better lighting.
The belief that love should look and feel the way it does on screen doesn’t fade away with the credits. If anything, it lingers. Research by Dutch researchers found that idealistic romantic beliefs are “more accessible immediately after exposure to a romantic movie.” A finding pointing out just how quickly deep fiction can shape expectations.
For Sacha, the expectations settled in early “I thought I would be swept off my feet and everything would be perfect and adventurous.” Now, she tries not to idealise one type of love, though she admits the remnants of her early dreams are hard to shake. After years of measuring her relationships up to the glossy bar set by representations of love in the 2010s, she’s still unsure of what love is supposed to look like.
“After all, how are we meant to feel when our boyfriends won’t dance with us in the rain,” she says.
While cinematic love continues to leave audiences chasing unrealistic ideals, one question remains: Is the echo of flawless love stories finally beginning to fade? In its place, might a new chorus rise? One that trades fantasy for truth, and finds beauty in the messy, honest, and real young love?
Is a new wave of storytelling emerging – one that dares to depict young love with honesty?
Teenage love has worn many faces on the screen. Wide-eyed and breathless, raw and rebellious, filtered and flawless. A polished fantasy played on loop like a carousel of perfect moments, spinning in circles but never moving forward, each scene too smooth to touch. But is the carousel slowing down? Is the illusion finally fading?
In its place, a quieter, more truthful cinema is emerging. One that embraces vulnerability and difference, trading fantasy for feeling. These are romances that don’t sparkle but breathe. Guided by the shifting tides of culture, filmmakers have begun to deconstruct the love stories once echoed in song lyrics and rebuild them with a deeper meaning.
LGBTQ+ narratives are stepping into frame challenging decades of heteronormative films. Overtly, “queer romantic teen films began to emerge in the independent sector in the 1990s,” Dr Baker says. When the 2018 film, Love, Simon directed by Greg Berlanti stepped into the spotlight, it marked a cultural turning point.
“It was the first mainstream studio romantic comedy told from the perspective of a gay teen,” Dr Baker says.
Sacha says the industry is “getting better” in terms of “authenticity and diversity” offering teenagers something rarely granted in cinema: romance without shame. Love, Simon doesn’t just tell a love story but normalises one. A far cry from the high-glossed romances of the past, Love Simon bravely opened a door, a door we thought would be shut forever. Since then, films like Sex Education and Heartstopper continue the work, normalising queer love stories with care and complexity.
“Romantic movies make my heart happy, I think I watch them in the hope to have something to look forward to,” Jaimi says.
She isn’t alone in feeling this way. As Sacha grows, so do the love stories on screen. Trying not to “compare her life experiences to what’s on the screen” she waits for “her type of love”. For Jaimi and Sacha, each at a different bend in the road of growing up, this new way of storytelling lands like a shared melody. One remembers what is missing, the other glimpses what might finally be possible.
Jaimi still dreams of love, but not the kind with rain-soaked confessions or cinematic kisses. The absence of grand gestures and fairytale endings once felt like failure but now feel like freedom, a chance to define love on her own terms, not by someone’s script. The illusion of teenage romance is an idealised portrayal of love as effortless. But real love, she learns, is softer, showing love in all its vulnerability. It is true, that love on screen is an illusion. Beautiful, yes. Memorable. But not real.
“I still want to feel my own type of love,” Jaimi says with a smile.
“Maybe I’ve just learned to expect it in a different way now.”
Maybe love doesn’t begin with a slow-motion kiss. Maybe it’s just sitting beside someone who listens. Or dancing alone. Whatever it looks like, it’s real. In the ordinary moments is where the story begins, and maybe the quiet kind of love is the most romantic story of all.
