The Dialectic of Romantic Comedy

An example of how the dialectic between freedom and necessity influences all the most important aspects of our psychic lives: We want to believe two contradictory things about love, that it is destiny to fall in love with the people we fall in love with, and that we have chosen them. Our love affairs have to be both the result of destiny and of a choice freely made. This is why romantic comedies always have a two-part structure. Boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl—that’s FATE. Boy loses girl; boy struggles to get girl back—that’s FREE WILL—there is always a moment of decision for the boy: should he mope about feeling sorry for himself for having lost the girl of his dreams, or should he run after her and through some feat of daring win her back? Of course, he gets her back in the end and she, in turn, forgives him. Thus fate and free will end up happily married.