Love, Movies, and the Lies We Grew Up Believing

Nobody ever tells you to pause and ask Bhai, why is this guy so obsessed with one human being? Why does his entire existence depend on someone who also eats, sleeps, overthinks, and gets bored like the rest of us? But we don’t ask. Because it looks romantic on screen.

Real life? It doesn’t give a damn about that template. Some stories don’t scream romance. They quietly walk away from it. No drama. No rebellion. Just silence. Like real life actually does. Sometimes people meet not to stay forever, but to mess each other up a little and leave. Because relationships don’t just introduce you to another person. They introduce you to parts of yourself you were comfortably ignoring. You fight. You say stupid things. You unlearn stuff you thought was permanent truth. You grow. Or you don’t. But you never stay the same.

And that’s why “500 Days of Summer” hit me differently. It felt like the English version of Raanjhanaa. Looks cute outside. But inside? Brutal. No comfort. No sugarcoating. Dekh le bhai, yahi hota hai.

It follows 500 days in the messy, confusing, beautiful but painful timeline of Tom and Summer. Tom is this twenty-something guy stuck in a boring job he doesn’t care about (which already felt a little personal, thank you very much). He believes in love. Not normal love. Certified pop-culture love. Soulmates. Destiny. One-person-will-save-my-life type love. The kind you grow up believing in when songs hit harder at 2 a.m. and the ceiling fan feels like your therapist.

Opposite him, we have Summer with those hypnotic eyes that look like they know more than they say. And she’s different. She doesn’t really believe in the whole “love” myth. Or at least she doesn’t think it’s for her. She doesn’t like labels, She hates the idea of calling something a relationship and then to building expectations around it until it collapses under its own weight. 

She believes feelings change, people change, and eventually somebody gets hurt and everything turns into a mess. So her philosophy is if you can function without all that emotional drama, Then why walk into the fire voluntarily? Typical GenZ

When Tom falls for her, it’s instant. And honestly, I can’t blame him. I’ve seen this happen too many times, including with myself. He doesn’t fall for her ideology. He falls because she’s beautiful. And that’s a truth most of us don’t like admitting.

They start something “casual.” Summer is honest from day one. Nothing serious. Tom agrees. Out loud. But inside his head? He’s already written the full story. He’s cast himself as the hero (Kundun) and given her the lead role (Zoya), without checking if she even wanted the script. 

Ye humara hi failaya hua sanichar hai, par hum bhi kya karte hum sanichar se he dil laga bethe.

And that’s the dangerous part. When someone walks into your life and suddenly things feel lighter. Like waking up tomorrow doesn’t feel heavy anymore. Problems don’t disappear, but they feel manageable. The future stops scaring you. Hope stops feeling stupid.

I’ve felt that. And once you feel it, losing it hurts in a way that stays with you.

And when things start changing replies coming late, conversations feeling forced there’s no clear ending. No final fight. Just confusion. We are left replaying everything in our head. Every message. Every moment. Wondering how someone can cross emotional lines and later say it was all just fun or worst just disappear.

I have felt this too, like all of us

We don’t just get heartbroken by what people do. We get heartbroken by the stories we secretly write in our own heads.

I’ve lived that "Expectation vs. Reality" scene every day for 2 years now. I thought cracking the exam was the climax of my movie. I thought that’s when the "Zoya" in my life would realize my worth. But she’s already left. She’s gone, and I’m sitting here with my FRM result like a fool.

I want to share this moment with her. I want to tell her, "Look, I did it." But there’s no reply. Just a blue tick or maybe not even that.

When I couldn’t handle it anymore, when everything I believed about my life collapsed, I didn’t react the way movies show it. There was no dramatic breakdown, no crying on the floor. I just went quiet. I stopped smiling without realizing it. And that silence scared me more than any breakup scene ever could.

The worst part comes later. It comes when you’re sitting with people, laughing at the right jokes, nodding at the right moments. No one would guess anything is wrong. But inside? Something is slowly cracking. It’s a quiet kind of pain. It just sits there. You feel alone even when you’re surrounded by people.

I realized I’ve done my own version of that. I couldn’t say things directly to her. I didn’t have the courage when it actually mattered. So I hid behind my blogs. Everything I couldn’t say out loud ended up there. The anger, the frustration. Writing felt safer than speaking. Safer than risking silence. I wasn’t afraid of saying the wrong thing, I was afraid of saying the right thing and still losing her.

That’s why 500 Days of Summer never felt like just a movie to me. It felt like someone quietly held up a mirror in front of my face when I wasn’t ready for it. No warning. No soft entry. Just here look. It doesn’t tell you to stop believing in love, and that’s the scary part. It simply asks you to look closely at what you’ve been calling love all this time. And suddenly you realize how much of it wasn’t even yours to begin with. 

Movies, songs, stories they shaped it for us long before we ever lived it. Somewhere along the way, we stopped questioning it. We didn’t even notice when their definitions slipped into our heads and settled there, quietly deciding how we should feel, what we should expect, and how heartbreak is supposed to look.

These movies, songs, stories they messed with our understanding of love so much that we didn’t even realize we were carrying their definitions inside us. True love doesn’t have to be the first person you meet or someone who gives you a bit of attention.

Writing all of this unfold, I don’t know why, but Zoya slipped back into my head. Not in a dramatic way. Not like a sad song moment. Just casually. Quietly. The way she always used to appear without warning, without asking permission. Because what I was watching felt uncomfortably familiar. It felt like looking at an old version of myself, from those years when I didn’t understand silences, didn’t understand tone, didn’t understand that gaps don’t always mean something is coming back. I pretended I didn’t care, but I cared about everything. I overthought every message, every emoji, every small kindness. I was that idiot who thought normal conversations meant something more, who confused attention with intention, kindness with destiny.

That expectations-versus-reality moment wasn’t a movie scene for me. I’ve lived it. Sitting with my phone in my hand, staring at the screen longer than I should have, waiting for a reply that never came. Writing stories in my head that never happened. Watching hope slowly embarrass itself. Seeing all of that on screen felt like watching my own past mistakes play out again, just with better lighting and background music.

And somewhere in all that mess, Zoya was just there. Not as heartbreak. Not as guilt. Not even as pain. Just as a reminder of a time. 

For a long time, I felt like I wasn't enough. I felt that to deserve someone "better" to deserve someone like her, I had to be someone important. So, I made a choice. I decided to give competitive exams. I thought, let me fill this emotional gap with books and numbers. Let me trade my feelings for a career.

Trust me, the last 2 years were nothing but sacrifice. It was all study and work. No friends, no family, no girls just the books and the silence. I became a ghost in my own life. I did all this just to forget her. I thought if I could just crack this, I would finally be "sorted." I would finally feel worthy.

And then, it happened. I cracked the FRM exams. Earlier I was nobody, but now I’m an FRM. People see the title, they see the success. But you know what’s the irony? I feel more lonely now than I ever did when I was a "nobody." Hahahaha.

The distraction is gone. The books are closed. And now that I have nothing to do, the silence is screaming. I have the title, I have the status, but I have no one to talk to. No one to share these feelings with. It’s a different kind of pain when you reach the top of the mountain and realize you’re standing there alone.

And maybe the hardest thing to accept is this that a lot of what I believed about love didn’t come from experience, it came from movies. From stories that were edited until nothing messy was left. And when reality didn’t match that picture, I thought something was wrong with me. Or with her.

Tom didn’t get the girl, but he got clarity. I got the FRM, but I got the truth. Life doesn’t hand out perfect endings with background music. It gives lessons instead. Sometimes painfully.

And one day, you notice something has shifted. You’re not waiting for a message anymore. You’re just living. Carrying what you learned. Letting go of what you didn’t need. And somehow, for the first time in a long time, even this silence feels like it might be enough.

Lekin Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost, par script ab hum khud likhenge