Bollywood gets many things wrong, but imbuing romance into love stories isn't one of them. In fact, if this genre had a physical form, it would probably be a man standing in the rain, holding a mandolin, waiting for a train that has already left. Or, more accurately, it would be Shah Rukh Khan, arms wide open, standing in the middle of a mustard field. If there is one thing Bollywood has perfected over the decades, it's the grand, sweeping, goosebumps-inducing love stories that make real-life relationships look like dull PowerPoint presentations. However, let's face it—whether we admit it or not, we love every second of it.

Bollywood love stories make you believe in magic, not the sleight-of-hand kind, but the kind where the universe can even shift ever so slightly just to bring two people together. They depict love that lingers in the air like the last note of a melody, the kind that follows you long after the credits roll. They make it about a destined kind of love, that the universe personally curates. One does not just meet someone—they crash into them at the perfect angle, their books fly into the air in slow motion, their eyes lock, and suddenly a violin starts playing in the background. Do the duo then exchange numbers? No. Do they start dating like normal people? Absolutely not. They spend the next three hours running into each other in impossibly coincidental ways, albeit on the basis of the narrative they are written into.

It is not just the moments that matter, it is the scale of them. No one in Bollywood falls in love in a boring way. There is always a dramatic monologue, a life-altering decision, and a train that must be either caught or missed at the last second. From Raj and Simran's Switzerland rendezvous to Rahul and Anjali's basketball-fueled love story, Bollywood has mastered the art of making romance larger than life. How could it not when our real lives are just a series of mundane events involving grocery lists and WiFi issues? Bollywood romance is therefore the ultimate escape. in Bollywood, One does not just fall in love — one gets swept into it. It is never just about liking someone and texting them back promptly. It is about fate twisting and turning until the universe aligns perfectly to deliver the love story of the century. 

Therein lies the problem — Bollywood made us believe that love should be a spectacle, a grand gesture, a cinematic moment that would make strangers in the background pause, stare, and maybe even tear up a little. Love in real life is quiet, devoid of background dancers ready to join one in synchronised moves, and zero soft golden lighting making you look flawless in every frame. Instead, there's just you, overanalysing a "hmm" text at 2am, wondering if this is what romance has come to.

The worst part? Romance in Bollywood is not just unrealistic but dangerously forgiving. The protagonist can be the most toxic, red-flag-waving character, but if he spreads his arms and lip-syncs to a love ballad, all gets forgiven. If one is a rich, brooding CEO who has never heard of therapy, they can simply stare dramatically into the distance while a sad song plays, because, soon enough the woman of their dreams will fall in love with their emotional unavailability. If someone outright toxic delivers a passionate speech about how much a woman belongs with them, then they are most likely the hero of the story. Time and again, Bollywood has demonstrated that aggression is a way to flaunt love.

It is not just the men who get away with this. When a woman is truly in love, she will sacrifice everything—her dreams, her career, her entire personality—just to prove it. No one in Bollywood believes in normal, healthy communication. There are only grand misunderstandings and passionate declarations of love at the eleventh hour. Because, of course, why would anyone solve a problem with a conversation when they could instead run dramatically through an airport?

Yet, no matter how many times we tell ourselves that this is absurd, no matter how much we know that life is not a Karan Johar film, we still fall for it. At the end of the day, we want to believe in love the way Bollywood sells it. We still wait for that one moment when time slows down, where everything clicks into place, to make love feel cinematic. Sure, Bollywood romance is ridiculously unrealistic, but isn't that the whole point? Love, in its rawest form, is chaotic, unpredictable, and often messy. 

We want to believe that love is written in the stars, that it defies logic, and that it has always been meant to find us. We want to believe that somewhere, somehow, someone is waiting for the moment our stories collide. And when they do, it won't just be love—it will be like the Bollywood love stories—the kind that makes the world fade away, makes time stand still, and makes us believe, even for a moment, that magic is real. Maybe this is why Bollywood romance never fails—deep down, no matter how much reality disappoints us, we still want to believe in its magic.

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