Boy meets girl. Girl has a crush on boy. But boy isn’t so sure he’s ready.
After a huge back and forth, boy realises he’s been in love with girl all along.
It’s a tale as old as time and it’s the plot to Netflix’s TV adaptation of One Day, based on David Nicholls’ novel of the same name and the 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway.
It’s hailed by many as a beautiful love story, but it still relies on the infuriating romantic trope that the evasive man will eventually realise true love was right under his nose all along.
It’s a plot point I’ll never be able to quite get past.
I remember wasting many years of my single life hoping that a man who blew hot and cold would suddenly realise how great I was.
In my teens, I shed many tears over a guy who acted as though the sheer tightness of his skinny jeans was enough reason to find a new girl to help him out of them every night.
The issue with romanticising the emotionally unavailable man on screen is that we can often make excuses for the emotionally unavailable man off screen.
I believed this man’s insistence on shagging others and failure to make a commitment to me may simply be part of our tangled romantic journey.
Spoiler alert. It wasn’t.
But I had grown up being taught that the course of true love never runs smoothly. It wasn’t a simple tale of boy meets girl without a series of hurdles to get to the happy ever after.
I believed that, like the men I saw depicted on screen, a love interest could be scared of their feelings, not sure they were ready for commitment or dealing with issues from their past.
It took me years to realise that this man only ever exists in fiction. In reality, if a man acts like he’s not interested, it’s because he usually isn’t.
For anyone who hasn’t seen One Day, Emma (Ambika Mod) and Dexter (Leo Woodall) meet at Edinburgh University on the day of their graduation in 1988. They’re from different worlds – he’s a rich boy from the south and she’s a working class girl from the north.
After a one night stand that never quite was, they agree to be friends. Yet it’s clear from the start that Emma has feelings, while Dexter claims to adore her, but continues to shag his way through a series of forgetful lovers.
Over 20 years, they stay in touch while snapshots of their lives are revealed on the same day – 15 July – of each year.
One scene cuts between the pair having sexual encounters with other people and while Emma is clearly fantasising about Dexter, he is throwing a mystery woman around a bedroom in Rome – with Emma seemingly the furthest thought from his mind.
The friends later venture to Greece in 1991 and after Emma confesses she once had a crush on him, Dexter admits he had feelings too. Though he quickly minimises them by insisting he ‘fancies everybody’ and says he isn’t looking for anything serious.
This is the moment Emma realises that she’s let Dex string her along all this time – but she doesn’t fully cut the cord on the friendship.
So many women will relate to the crushing blow served to Emma in that moment. When the man you so desperately want to like you back offers you the tiniest glimmer of hope, only to quickly snatch it away. The kind of man that pulls the rug from under you so often, you feel constantly unsteady in their presence.
Without giving away spoilers, Dexter does have the chance to redeem himself with Emma, but for me, the damage was done.
Once again, we’ve celebrated a man treating a woman he claims to be friends with – and also sees romantically – pretty poorly, all because he comes round in the end.
One Day is not the only culprit to rely on this sloppy romantic trope.
Take John James Preston (better known as ‘Big’) in Sex and the City. He’s cold and noncommittal to Carrie – both while they’re dating (revealing that he was previously married and doesn’t want to do that again) and then after they break up and try to remain friends.
Then in season three, he drops the bombshell that he’s engaged to Natasha and Carrie has the shattering realisation that he did want to get married, just not her.
But then they get back together again, and we’re supposed to be happy about it? To forgive him because they really were a perfect match all along?
In the real world, a man like Big would have stayed married to the prim and perfect Natashas of this world and thrown Carrie a casual ‘hey you’ text message every few months when he was nervous he’d lost his hold over her.
Then there’s the 2009 film, He’s Just Not That Into You, which appeared to call out the problematic themes that existed in onscreen romances yet fell at the final hurdle when they made Neil (Ben Affleck) propose to Beth (Jennier Aniston) after years of refusing to do so. Then Alex (Justin Long) realised he was madly in love with Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin) despite rudely pushing her away.
Across this side of the pond, we had the 2007 show Skins deciding that Tony would suddenly realise how much he loved Michelle after spending all of season one shagging everything that moved and playing emotional mind games with her and his best mate Sid.
But us millennials romanticised that relationship and we were fools to do so. Anyone who has fallen victim to a Tony as a teenager knows that they never change their ways.
In the real world, Tony would now be in his thirties, still shagging posh girls for fun and probably liking Instagram photos of Michelle from 2019 just to mess with her head.
As for me, I’ve been happily settled down for almost a decade now. When I met my partner in my late twenties, I realised that I didn’t need to endure a chaotic act two to achieve my happy ending in act three.
After spending my younger years trying to convince certain men to realise how great I was, it felt fantastic to find someone who did it on their own.
So while One Day may be moving, insightful and beautifully acted, I truly believe that a better love story is when the female protagonist isn’t perceived as this complex, chaotic creature that the leading man slowly grows to love.
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And for the Emmas of this world, I firmly believe their knight in shining armour should have been a man who realised their worth from the get go.
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