With Valentine’s Day comes every movie websites lists of Best Movies About Love, Most Romantic Movies Ever, Best Movies To Watch On Valentine’s, and then of course the accompanying lists to balance all this out, like Best Movies For Singles On Valentine’s Day and the like. Mostly though, we get to read and hear about the same movies year after year.
And it’s sweet, and these movies are fun enough and awaken certain emotions that are expressed in a healthy way so long as we recognize the artifice of the thing that’s arousing them. And sometimes we’ll get a few movies earning mention that are legitimately and wholly lovely and romantic and heartwarming.
But there are some movies that garner this label of “romantic” when if you think about them after the warm feelings wear off, they’re kind of really depressing. It’s not just for their promotion of co-dependency, or their unrealistic portrayals of love and romance that could potentially lead to hopeless expectations for people in their real lives, although these are genuine sources of skepticism towards romantic movies. No, it’s usually because the stories themselves are a little disconcerting, sometimes downright offensive and romanticizing abuse or other unhealthy actions toward purported loved ones.
A lot of this is in jest, with full realization of the surface intentions of these movies, which are sweet and ultimately harmless in all honesty. But I’m still going to go through with a brief list of rants. Here are 7 movies that may have seemed romantic at first but, upon further reflection, are actually real downers.