Amidst the woes of having to stay at home, my wife and I have begun a project to watch Adam Driver’s entire catalog. Recently, we watched “What If” which stars Daniel Radcliffe as the cynical single guy and Driver as the spontaneous romantic who proves all of Radcliffe’s ideas wrong. It’s a romance trope that is highly overused, but it might have an honest lesson about love philosophies.

Radcliffe’s character is vehemently against starting a relationship from cheating or after someone’s breakup saying “if it starts dirty, it will end dirty.” Because of this, he feels he can only be friends with Zoe Kazan because she has a boyfriend.

Adam Driver completely destroys this love philosophy by beginning a relationship through cheating and eventually marrying them. This comes to a peak when Driver, after a scheme to get Radcliffe and Kazan to hook up, says to Radcliffe “All this love shit is complicated, and that’s good because if it’s too simple, you’ve got no reason to try.”

“What If” isn’t the first romance movie to use this pairing to discuss ideas of love. One of the other movies that come to mind is a favorite of my mom: “Someone Like You” from 2001. Ashley Judd’s character develops a theory of love based on bulls never mounting the same cow twice. She writes a column on this “new cow theory” where men are the bull, never returning to the same woman, under a pseudonym and accidentally acquires notoriety.

Opposite Judd is Hugh Jackman who plays your typical 2000s womanizing character and is the peak example of the “new cow theory” man. He has multiple women visit his apartment, where he is roommates with Judd after her breakup, and never has the same woman twice.

In a lapse of judgment, Judd and Jackman wake up in bed together and Jackman tells she can’t analyze it under her animal-based theories. By the end of the movie, Judd appears to be wrong as Jackman’s character decides that he loves her and wants to be with her exclusively.

Another movie famous love philosophy is the 2005 film “Hitch” starring Will Smith and Kevin James. Smith’s titular character has created a system of love that he uses to help struggling men starting many of his narrations with “basic principles.”

Hitch believes that any man can sweep any woman off her feet “he just needs the right broom” which is where he comes in. He has many supposedly foolproof theories on love including how 90% of what a man says isn’t his words, and that women lie to men to either tell them nicely to get away “or possibly try harder stupid.”

These theories come crashing down as Smith falls in love with Eva Mendes’ character who is a reporter trying to expose his “tricking” women into falling for unconfident guys. Ironically, Hitch’s theories don’t work for him, as his fall with Sara is messy and complicated.

Kevin James and Amber Valletta’s romance also prove him wrong when her confrontation with Smith reveals that it wasn’t his techniques that made her fall for James, but James’ own quirks. The movie sums up this conflict nicely with Smith’s final line: “basic principles: there are none.”

This isn’t the end as there are many more examples of this trope: “Down With Love,” “He’s Just Not That Into You,” “The Ugly Truth,” and “Love, Actually” just to name a few. This trope is prevalent throughout the romance film genre. The next question is, what is Hollywood trying to say about love?

One message in all of these films is that love is complicated. It’s not a simple attraction, but a buildup of interactions, conversations and potential conflicts that end in a relationship. Society tends to focus on how a couple met, but not so much how the past, before and after the start of the relationship, ended in love.

Because of this complexity, any attempt to pigeonhole love and relationships will ultimately fail. These movies suggest that the important thing isn’t necessarily figuring out love and then pursuing a relationship, but that love is a journey where one doesn’t know it’s happening until they’ve already arrived.

It’s an extremely powerful idea: that love is out of our control and any attempt to control it will be futile. I know in my personal experience, there just came a time when I knew that I loved my wife and I wanted to be with her for the rest of my life. I didn’t plan on it and I’m sure many happy couples would express feeling the same.

Love philosophy, at least in the movies, is doomed because there’s too much that contributes to a relationship to be narrowed down to a few principles. The best romances are ones that are the culmination of conflicts, and resolutions that may be difficult but are their own reward.