Affairs

By Johanne R. Macob

A FEW nights back, my sister and I watched a movie. It was the movie that many have been raving about. It was a story of two couples: one was married; the other was supposedly to get married. However, things didn’t happen as planned. The wife, in the first couple, was caught having an affair; the boyfriend, in the second couple, was guilty of the same. Their stories intertwined when the husband from couple 1 and the girlfriend from couple 2 started seeing each other…and well, the rest was something we all expected to happen.

This isn’t a movie review. For one, I’m not very technical with filmmaking. It just dawned on me that stories with complicated relationships are so in these days. The movie is a blockbuster. Same plot with most movies I’ve seen before, with one of the main characters either ending up with another or falling in love with another before getting back to his or her original partner. Even television shows with ‘affairs’ as their theme get high ratings. There was also this TV show that earned high ratings, with the main man having an affair with another man. I started thinking why we, people, love complicated stories with complicated plots, or with complex relational aspect. People are now less interested, I think, with the traditional rich-guy-loves-a-poor-girl-or-vice-versa plot, where the conflict revolves around socio-economic disparity.

Maybe people do not just love complicated movies or ‘teleseryes,’ they are just, now more than ever, open to the idea that many such complications really exist. Such complications that do not only talk about who has the most money or who has the least. We have learned to embrace that it’s a fact, and not an opinion, that complicated stories and relationships have existed way longer than the reels started showing them. And that complications are not always necessarily bad. We have learned to accept that one’s first lover may not be his or her last, that a marriage might not always work out as planned, that ideals are not always met.

This is our reality. The moment mainstream filmmakers started crafting their stories based on real lives, and not on fairytale or conventional tales, was the day people started watching movies and TV shows not as distorted forms of reality, but as reflections of realities. I am not, in any way, saying I’m in favor of these affairs, or the other way around.  All I’m saying is, perhaps, as proven by our preference with storylines, we are more realistic- definitely not pessimistic- than ever.

It just feels liberating.

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