Romcoms like One Day have utterly ruined my love life (2024)

Emotional turmoil makes for excellent TV and film -and dire real-life relationships

February 14, 2024 12:00 pm

Is it really love if you’re not agonising over it? For much of my young adult life, that was the question that percolated in my head on repeat, like the chorus of a Toploader song at the end of a wedding. Up until the age of around 24, the thing I craved more than anything was a compelling love story.

Not just any kind of story, though, an epic will-they, won’t-they narrative, one spanning years of emotional turmoil, perpetual heartbreak, and possibly with a side order of family trauma for good measure. What I wanted was One Day, the phenomenal bestseller written by David Nicholls that has just been turned into an even more phenomenal series for Netflix, starring Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod.

For the minority among you who are unfamiliar with the story: One Day follows the lives of university graduates Emma (Mod) and Dexter (Woodall) on 15 July for a period spanning 20 years, starting on their graduation night in 1989. After spending the evening together (without having sex), the pair form a close friendship, fostering the kind of intimacy most couples could only dream of.

There are sun-soaked holidays, drunken confessions of love, and some cataclysmic arguments. But through it all, Emma and Dexter always manage to find their way back to each other. Because that’s what true love is: pain, volatility, drama. At least, that was my main takeaway after reading the book as a 15-year-old and fawning over the 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (am I the only person who happened to adore that adaptation?).

It was also the message I took from the diet of romcoms and TV dramas I feverishly consumed throughout my adolescence. If it wasn’t Peyton Sawyer and Lucas Scott in One Tree Hill, it was Elena Gilbert and Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries.

Carrie Bradshaw and Mr Big in Sex and the City. Carrie and Charles in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Zack Siler and Laney Boggs in She’s All That. Marissa Cooper and Ryan Atwood in The OC. Allie Nelson and Noah Calhoun in The Notebook. You get the idea.

The thing all these on-screen couples have in common is unpredictability, a total lack of stability that makes for excellent TV and film but dire real-life relationships. As an older and wiser adult I can see that now. Back then, of course, this was simply what I thought relationships were. You had to chase someone, long for them, and doodle their name next to yours in hearts inside your school notebooks (yes, 16-year-old me did that).

My point is that my entry to romance was coloured by a compulsion towards toxicity. Unsurprisingly, this had some disastrous consequences for my love life.

There were unrequited crushes I’d spend years clinging onto, thinking it was only a matter of time until they reciprocated my feelings. And that was okay because the longer I waited, the more meaningful our inevitable union would be. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was more in love with: the person I was supposedly pining after, or the narrative I’d created around them – I suspect it was the latter.

Then there were the near-misses and brief flirtations I spent the better part of a decade yearning for, wondering what could have been.

Like with Emma and Dexter, both of whom remain close through serious relationships with other people, some of the people I fawned over were taken. But that only added to the spectacle of it all: another hurdle for us to overcome when we eventually got together. Another weapon for my creative arsenal, bringing colour and character to the epic story I was writing.

Surely it must be some kind of sickness. Because it never took much to fuel the fire, either. There are some people from this time in my life whose casual compliments and flippant remarks I can still recite verbatim because of how much meaning I attached to them at the time.

The chap who once told me I was “glowing” would go on to become the object of my affections for months. The one who offered me his jumper outside a restaurant became, for a brief period, a potential future husband. And the neighbour who, in response to a passing stranger that had muttered, “She’s beautiful,” towards me, said, “Isn’t she?” A comment that would go on to haunt me for far longer than I care to admit.

So yes, do watch the new One Day. But remember, real-life relationships aren’t meant to be so up and down. In fact, I’ve heard they’re meant to be fairly steady. Safe. Reliable. Who knew?

Olivia Petter is a writer, podcast host and the author of Millennial Love