10 Movies That Influenced Audiences In Awful Ways

In 2008, a study of romantic comedies found that those who consume a lot of these movies end up with a skewed view of love. No, this doesn't mean that women think rich businessmen will fall for them and rescue them from their lives as call girls. Instead, people who were really into romantic comedies overwhelmingly believed that love conquers all.

These are the ones who think the other should always be the one to apologise, no matter what; the ones who think that a big gesture can fix any horrifying thing they've done; those who believe in "the one" who immediately knows them so well they can almost read their minds. This warped vision can lead to the breakdown of good relationships over relatively normal behaviour, simply because it doesn't match the scripted perfection of the movies.

Even this is minor compared to the 2015 University of Michigan study, I Did It Because I Never Stopped Loving You. That went so far as to prove that “the romanticised pursuit-behaviours commonly featured in the media as part of a normative courtship can lead to stalker-supporting beliefs.” Basically, the more that behaviour that would be terrifying in real life is rebranded as cutesy innocent romance (looking at you again Twilight) on screen, the more difficult it becomes for those invested in that media to separate the two.

And, as these movies are marketed as family-friendly, children grow up idealising that behaviour, thinking it normal to express their love by following the object of their desire until they've been worn down, or showing up inside their house to watch them sleep, or blasting the song they had sex to at them through whatever the modern equivalent of a ghetto blaster is. More terrifyingly, they think it's normal to receive expressions of love in those ways. The more obsessed and single-minded in their pursuit of them, the better.

By the triumvirate powers of the great rom-com gods, Katherine Heigl, Meg Ryan, and Julia Roberts, that's no world to live in.