Description
A big part of the entertainment industry are films, which have been enjoyable entertainment for audiences for decades. More specifically, romantic comedies have been around for nearly 90 years and are a successful genre for the movie industry, bringing almost $10 billion in the past 12 years. It is widely known romantic comedy films give its audiences unrealistic expectations about love and relationships, which can be a contributing factor to dysfunctional relationships in the future. Idealization of a partner is an example of what romantic comedies display as an unrealistic expectation, which can overemphasize the good qualities and neglect the flaws and imperfections that are present. In the most recently explored study on romantic comedies (rom-com), three factors were shown to be of significance in regard to rom-com consumption: romantic idealism, romantic cynicism, and romantic preference. Along with the three constructs, this study investigated how rom-com consumption is related to the thematically-relevant constructs of relationship satisfaction, commitment, and infidelity. Keywords: rom-com, romantic idealism, romantic cynicism, infidelity
