Rom-coms & Disney Princess films: how our comfort movies have impacted how we date and enjoy single life

Rom-coms, Disney princesses, and why we still expect love to look like the movies. I've always watched movies, TV shows, and read books as a way to understand myself and to work out what to expect from life, and this episode asks what happens when "what to expect" came from a childhood of Disney princesses and rom-coms.

Millennial women are the first generation raised with on-demand access to film and TV; meaning we absorbed the golden era of Disney princess movies and the golden age of the rom-com more completely than any generation before us.

Bree talks to Dr. Veronica Hefner, associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Dominican University of California, whose research examines exactly how romantic films and Disney princess movies shape real beliefs about love, dating, and relationships.

In this episode you'll learn:

• What "happily ever after" actually trains us to expect from love and a partner
• Why we keep attracting the wrong people, and how rom-com idealism can prime us for emotionally unavailable men
• How childhood media exposure connects to anxious attachment and avoidant attachment patterns later in life
• Whether it's still okay to watch these films, knowing what we now know
• How to untangle what we actually want from what we were taught to want
• Why we expect real life to imitate art in the first place
• The genuine, researched benefits of rom-com watching, and how to actually be happy alone instead of waiting for a movie ending

We reference Sex and the City, Eat Pray Love, Bridget Jones's Diary, (500) Days of Summer, Serendipity, Notting Hill, and Sleepless in Seattle throughout.

If you've ever caught yourself measuring your single life against a movie you watched twenty years ago, this episode is for you.

Dr. Veronica Hefner: hefner.faculty.ucdavis.edu

Substack memoir — last year of single in real time: breesteele.substack.com

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Listen to the full series (best in order)

Host and Executive Producer: Bree Steele

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