Calling bullsh*t on 'the grand gesture'

We may have been raised on a diet of dramatic displays, but the modern dater is officially over it. Here's what's replacing it...

- Saumyaa Vohra

It's 1989. John Cusack is standing beneath Ione Skye's bedroom window in Say Anything. A boombox blares Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes. He gets the girl. Fifteen years later, Ross is running to the airport so he can tell Rachel he loves her. She gets off the plane. Richard Gere climbs a fire escape for Julia Roberts. In another timeline, Roberts stands in front of Hugh Grant, just a girl asking a boy to love her. Hugh Grant, in an alternate universe, is debuting a love song he wrote for Drew Barrymore in concert at Madison Square Garden.

Any millennial-slash-Gen Z childhood was simply riddled with The Grand Gesture™, the catch-all end-of-movie moment that rights every wrong, asserting once and for all that size does, in fact, matter. It is the marker of a “big” love; one that separates it from the quiet, every day love that most couples experience. It is the perfect prefix to the Hollywood kiss. It's why proposal photography, as a concept, even exists.

I've consumed enough romcoms (in the name of research, of course) to have internalised what a lot of my generation did as well—that the grand gesture was the Hail Mary that could save any sinking (relation)ship. And if you look at the grand gesture with a closer lens, you realise that's what its purpose is; to save. The move is a big, sweeping moment that carries away the very real problems that preceded it. In 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), Julia Stiles forgives Heath Ledger for being paid to date her because he...buys her her dream guitar. In She's All That (1999), a chase and a dance magically fixes the fact that Freddie Prinz Junior dated Rachel Leigh Cook to win a bet. Tom Hanks organises a park date in You've Got Mail (1998) to...make up for bankrupting Meg Ryan's bookshop?