It's sixteen years since The Notebook__ came out, but we still can't get enough. Now that it's landed on Netflix, you just know we'll be watching it through our tears. You've seen it, right? That wonderful beautiful film about love lost and found, that still moves you if you watch it now. It’s also the film that took Ryan Gosling from Mr Sandra Bullock’s ex to the feminism-safe objectification hottie for forward-thinking women everywhere, and made Rachel McAdams a star in her own right beyond that little film called Mean Girls.
The problem is, there are a few life lessons from_The Notebook_ that our impressionable young selves took a little too literally. Here’s a few things we learned that turned out not to be true at all…
Your first love is your true love
Do you remember 18-year-old you? Stacked full of hormones, high on WKDs and in the throws of an emotional conflict with your Mum, best friends and whoever else was in a 20-foot radius of you at all times? While Allie and Noah obviously do end up together, please do excuse our cynicism when we suggest Allie’s parents might have had a more compos mentis approach than her as to whether her teenage summer fling should turn into a lifelong relationship.
Hell, if we’d stuck fast to our high school boyfriend we’d already be three kids down with a job in Tesco to boot. It’s amazing how sexy a Vauxhall Nova looks when you’re 16.
Kooky women are adorable
‘If you’re a bird, then I’m a bird.’ Oh HELLS no. That is not the way a normal man replies to a girl dancing around the sea making seagull noises shouting, ‘Say I’m a bird!’ Instead, that’s about the time they tell us we’ve had too much to drink, call a taxi home and tuck us up with a bowl next to the bed to be sick into.
First time sex is amazing
‘That’s what I’ve been missing?’ Squeals Allie when her and Noah finally have sex in later life. ‘Let’s do it again!’
Hey, if that’s how it happened for you, sister, then good for you. It’s just, in our humble experience, things don’t normally run quite that smoothly. Whether it’s something to do with the four glasses of sauvignon we’ve downed or a little thing called nerves, ‘doing it again’ isn’t normally top of our priorities.
True love can overcome degenerative diseases
If you’ve ever had a family member with dementia, you’ll know that once they’ve got to point where they’ve forgotten their own family, remembering any coherent narrative is going to a real struggle. The fact that Noah loves Allie SO MUCH and that their love story was SO STRONG that everything can all come rushing back to her in one beautiful moment is, erm, a bit silly and, quite frankly, a little discourteous to people dealing with the disease.
Scorned women should concede defeat gracefully in the face of true love
The real hero of the story here is war widow Martha. Not only does she have to deal with an emotionally unavailable grumpfest who probably isn’t a patch on her dead husband, she shows up one day to find a perky rich girl full of first world problems has stolen Noah off her.
Despite all of this, Martha heads in and hangs out with the two, whereas we’d probably drive our car straight into that ‘labour-of-love’ house of his and do as much damage as humanly possible. But maybe that's just us.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.