Life is not the Movies

Now I know why I am irrepressibly melancholy & none of my romantic relationships work. Because life is not like the Movies:

Alain de Botton:
"[On some movies, they are] enjoyable because they reflect our deep-seated wish for intense, conflict-free love, and irritating because we know these relationships to be untrue to genuine experience. In their lack of realism, the love scenes seem almost to deny us the chance of happiness in our own lives. They humiliate us with the gap they reveal between what we are likely to have tasted and the events on screen. They also leave us feeling sad. Our sadness won't be of the searing kind, more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the happiness before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless presentation of happiness on film can throw into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of how we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remains."