10 romantic dramas that weren’t just love stories; they were love letters to love itself

These romantic dramas don't just depict love, they sing it like ballads or odes capturing the very essence of what it means to love just like Materialists! 

It’s one thing to watch two people fall in love while they’re still figuring out who they are and what they want from life. That slow unfolding, the uncertainty, the hesitation - it’s all a part of the magic. You know they’re meant for each other long before they do, and part of the joy is watching them catch up to the truth. That’s the charm of a good romance film which makes you realize that you never really see love coming, and often, you don’t even recognize it when it does. But then, there are those special romance films that go a step further. They don’t just entertain us with a “will-they-won’t-they”, rather, they feel like love letters to love itself. They try to explain what love feels like, what it looks like in real life, and how it’s not always about ending up together. These are the movies that attempt to translate a feeling that's invisibly intangible to put into words, images, and emotion.

Also Read: POV: Why Materialists feels like an early 2000s rom-com!

Materialists falls into that category. More than a romantic comedy or a romantic drama, it feels like a meditation on modern New York love like a written love letter. It’s about finding love in a time of ambition, image, and materialism. The film follows characters who are self-aware enough to know what they want yet too scared to be vulnerable enough to reach for it. It’s a story of love emerging between people who are still very much a work in progress.

If you felt moved by Celine Song’s Materialists, here are a few more that feel like love letters to romance in their deepest sense! 

Jerry Maguire and When Harry Met Sally

These are love stories not written in the stars, but built here on earth, slowly, imperfectly, and with a lot of effort. Because no one here falls in love at first sight. In fact, Jerry feels more obligated to Dorothy than enchanted by her. And Harry and Sally do not see each other as a romantic possibility, but as an annoying yet endearing best friends. But what these films do is potray love as a choice. It’s something you grow into, something that takes work as well as time. They remind us that love isn’t always found in sweeping gestures, but in the quiet moments of showing up, learning to understand someone, choosing them again and again through the ordinary mess of life. This is love grounded in reality, in shared dinners, honest fights, and the slow realization that this person, right here, is home.

Pride and Prejudice and Emma

Who better than Jane Austen to write a perfect love letter to love itself? Hence both these film adaptations go beyond the “enemies to lovers” trope. Pride and Prejudice and Emma are ultimately stories about self-growth. They’re about learning to look inward, overcome your own pride, prejudice, or vanity before you can fully be vulnerable to another person. Love, in these stories, isn’t about perfect compatibility or sweeping passion. It’s about seeing the person right in front of you clearly, perhaps for the first time, after shedding the assumptions and biases that once clouded your view. It’s about accepting to be loved not in spite of your flaws, but with them. 

Phantom Thread and Blue Valentine

Not all love stories are healthy, some are too real, messy, humane, and too much. Because love isn’t always about finding the “right” person, it’s about finding the person who is the right fit, one you think you deserve and in some cases, that connection can be toxic, even destructive. That’s what happened in both these films! In Phantom Thread, love becomes an obsessive power play where dysfunction is the demand of the relationship and the need to be needed, something like air, blur the lines between romance and survival. And in Blue Valentine, becomes about the quieter tragedy of love that once was pure but can no longer survive. It’s about the heartbreak of walking away from someone you still love because the relationship has stopped working, not for lack of love but because love alone isn’t always enough. 

Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Atonement

If passion in love that goes beyond even mortality could be captured in cinema, it would look something like this. These films aren’t just about romantic longing but about the kind of love that passionately consumes you, that lingers long after it’s lost, and leaves a mark so deep it becomes a part of who you are. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, love is a slow burning flame. Sort of like a connection so intense and fragile that it is unexplainable and existing in unspoken. It never gets to exist in the real world; it exists in a world of its own yet burns brighter. While in Atonement, love is torn apart by forces outside itself. It explores the agony of being apart from each other and yet living in the deep ache of what could have been, even if the lovers are never reunited in life, the memory of their love becomes a kind of parallel existence. Both films talk about eternal love, something that doesn’t get a future and its only life is in memory, art or fiction. 

La La Land and Past Lives

While death brings the finality of physical loss, there’s a unique kind of heartbreak in knowing your person, the one made for you is out there but yet they’re no longer yours. Both films explore this beautifully haunting kind of heartbreak. It might look like these stories aren’t about losing love, rather they’re about holding it gently, even when you can’t keep it. La La Land explores that bittersweet feeling of letting someone go for the sake of your dreams, or theirs. It’s about how love can be real, even right and yet it still might not work. Whereas Past Lives takes that loss in a deeper philosophical sense - it’s about timing, fate, how the right person can come at the wrong time and the way some people are a part of your soul but not your future. They are about love that transforms rather than lasts because sometimes, it ends with a look across a crowded room, a memory that lingers, or a life made better, if only briefly by love.

Are there other films that feel like a love letter to love itself? Tell us in the comments below! 

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