#469 - Beware the Hollywood Script
Over the weekend I watched a great old movie. Emotion, drama, even racial tension. The movie was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
It holds up for a lot of reasons. It took on the racial issues of its day with real courage. The cast is wonderful. And it tugs hard on your heart strings.
If you haven't seen it, it's a movie about young love. Sort of. It's really about the passionate love between two people, one 37 and one 23, who've known each other for all of ten days.
Both fathers are dead set against the wedding at first. Both mothers get swept up in the sheer emotion of watching their children in love and wanting to marry. And at the end, Spencer Tracy delivers one of the great monologues in film, the kind that leaves you with that warm, happily-ever-after glow as the credits roll.
It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking. But here's the thing I kept coming back to.
It's a movie.
The story we were handed long before we ever dated
We were all handed this script young. Boy meets girl, sparks fly, the music swells, and you just know. Ten days, ten minutes, it doesn't matter, because in the movie the feeling is the proof. The certainty shows up first, and all the details sort themselves out somewhere off screen.
And then the credits roll. Right before the part where real life starts.
Here's why I'm bringing this up. When you've been through a divorce, or you've lost a spouse, that script gets more tempting, not less. You're tired of being alone. You want to feel that sweep again, the one that tells you the waiting is finally over and you've been chosen. So when someone walks in and it feels like the movie, the last thing you want to do is slow down and ask questions. The feeling is so good you take it as the answer.
I understand that completely. I've felt the pull myself. But the Hollywood script leaves out the only part that actually matters.
What ten days can't tell you
The movie skips the part where you find out who someone really is.
Take the age gap in the story. I hear "age is just a number" all the time. But is it really? When the gap gets wide enough, you're not just dating a person, you're dating a whole history that isn't yours. I lived through the Vietnam war. The protests, the upheaval, the Age of Aquarius, and honestly some of the greatest rock music ever written. Date someone even ten years younger and half of what shaped me is a paragraph in their history book. That isn't a dealbreaker on its own. But it's real, and the movie never makes you sit through that conversation.
And that's only the history you can see today. The part almost nobody stops to think about is what the gap does over time. When I was writing Dating Backward, I interviewed a woman who had married a man twenty years older. On their wedding day, the gap barely registered. By the time we talked, twenty-five years later, she was 55 and he was 75. She still had the energy to go out and enjoy the night. He was perfectly happy at home in front of the TV, by his own choice. Neither of them was wrong. They had simply arrived at different stages of life at the same moment. The gap that meant almost nothing at the start meant a great deal in the end. The movie never shows you year twenty-five.
Then there's the speed. Falling in love in two weeks and planning a wedding makes for a gorgeous third act. In real life it just means you committed before you knew. I was talking with someone recently whose friend got divorced and was remarried inside of six months. And the issue isn't the romance. It's that six months isn't enough time to truly know a person. Neither is ten days. The feeling can be completely real and still not be enough information.
The kiss worth waiting for
Here's where I want to leave you, because I think it changes everything about how you date from here.
The Hollywood script sells you the first kiss. The fireworks, the swell of music, the moment everything tilts. And then it cuts away, because the movie only needs the spark. It never has to find out whether these two people can actually build a life.
But you're not making a movie. If you want your next relationship to be your last, you're not really looking for the most dramatic first kiss. You're looking for your last first kiss. The one after which there are no more first kisses, because you finally found the person worth stopping for.
That kiss usually doesn't come with fireworks. It comes with a quiet certainty that took time to earn. It's recognizable, not because a feeling swept you off your feet, but because everything you took the time to learn about this person kept pointing in the same direction.
The movie wants to sell you urgency and call it love. What you actually want is clarity. And clarity never arrives in ten days.
So the next time it feels like the script, like the music's swelling and you just know, let that be the moment you slow down instead of speed up. Not because the feeling is wrong. Because if this is going to be your last first kiss, it deserves more than a feeling. It deserves to be true.
If you're tired of chasing the movie version and you're ready to build toward the real one, that's exactly the kind of work we do together. When you're ready, grab a free 30-minute Discovery Call and let's talk: CLICK HERE to schedule your call.