"The Way We Were" Is a Cautionary Tale

This movie made me sick (compliment)

One of my goals for the year is to watch more movies, especially classic films that did not, for whatever reason, make it into my cart at Blockbuster growing up. So last night I rented the 1973 film The Way We Were starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.

I was familiar with it, of course, as a pop culture institution, and have seen that one scene from Gilmore Girls and the other from Sex and the City but all I really knew about it is that it’s often called the “most romantic film of all time” and as a scholar of the romance genre, I assumed I’d love it.

However, this movie is not a romance movie. It is a horror film. I felt nauseous from the beginning. I watched parts of it through my hands, partially covering my eyes. If you thought The Substance was disturbing, it has absolutely nothing on this bad boy.

That’s not to say I didn’t like it. I loooooved it, but it also made me feel hashtag seen, and not in a way I was prepared for.

In case you didn’t know, The Way We Were is a love story (allegedly) about a social activist Marxist, Katie, and a hot guy who isn’t really into politics. (This is, coincidentally, the exact same dynamic as every couple on the current season of Love Is Blind). They first meet in college, where Redford’s character, Hubble (Hubble!), is a hot, cool guy and Streisand’s Katie is kind of an outcast for her political views and her outspokenness. She’s a bookish nerd whereas Hubble is a jock and yet, AND YET, they fall for each other.

We know this trope and we love this trope, but The Way We Were doesn’t stop there. The movie follows their relationship over decades and their dynamic stays the same. They don’t get together in college but they have a couple of moments. Hubble makes Katie feel seen. He talks to her about his hopes and dreams. He wants her to read his writing because he values her feedback. Whereas other jocks like Hubble might be shallow (and Hubble is to a degree too), Hubble likes engaging in intellectual conversation with Katie. He’s attracted to her even though she’s not conventionally beautiful. He likes her because she’s the whole package: pretty, smart, amusing. For a girl like Katie, that combination is intoxicating. How often do guys like Hubble fall for girls like Katie? Seemingly never, so his attraction to her is all the more enticing.

When they run into each other years later, Hubble’s once again hesitant to start a real romantic relationship with Katie, but Katie pushes through. She knows he’s into her. Their chemistry is palpable and their connection is undeniable. She knows if she pushes hard enough, Hubble will have no choice but to finally give in.

And this all makes me sick.

Because where this leads is not, spoiler alert, a happily ever after, but a resolution to this classic trope that’s more realistic than I was expecting. See, despite his affection for Katie, Hubble never wanted to be with a woman like Katie. Hubble is the type of guy who was always supposed to end up with a beautiful, passive wife who sits beside him at his movie screenings but doesn’t have notes after. He was supposed to be with a woman who laughs it off when his Republican friends make jokes about FDR’s passing mere hours after his death instead of calling them out on their problematic behavior. He was supposed to be with someone uncomplicated, and Katie is anything but.

Hubble may have loved Katie (though you could make an argument that he was more in love with idea of being the type of guy who could be with someone like Katie), but he didn’t want a true partner. The sick thing is, he more or less told her this multiple times over the course of their relationship, but Katie ignored the red flags (also something they have in common with this current cast of Love Is Blind). She trusted their deep connection over reality, and this why I kept saying out loud I want to die, I want to die, I want to die during this film.

As I wrote in my Letterboxed review, “sometimes you fall for a fuckboy because he directs his charm at you and makes you feel seen and it ruins your entire life.”

What Katie goes through over the course of this movie is a familiar experience for so many of us who are more “smart” and “funny” than “hot” and “beautiful” (though also hot!).

How many of us have fallen in love with someone because they are not the type of guy who’d typically go for a girl like us? And how many of us have had our hearts broken when that guy starts dating someone conventionally hot and conventionally-minded instead?

This isn’t a knock on other women, I’d argue that these women are probably more layered than their partners give them credit for, but it is a knock on men in these types of situationships. And maybe points out how the nature of heterosexuality is irreparably damaged by the construct of not just marriage, but the pressure to maintain your position within your social circle.

Because Hubble isn’t just hot — he’s also cool. His friends are cool. There’s social structure within class and race, but we so rarely talk about the layer that being cool and popular adds. We hear it in Katie and Hubble’s first break up. “It’s because I’m not attractive enough, isn’t it?” Katie says. “I’m not attractive in the right way…I don’t have the right style.”

Even though they get back together at the end of this scene, Hubble doesn’t disagree. It’s clear he loves her. He values her. He knows she’s amazing. He’s attracted to her. He trusts her opinion. He values her feedback. Her thoughts on his work mean more to him than anyone else’s. But she doesn’t have the right style. She’s not cool. She doesn’t fit in with him and his friends the way other women who know the right way to dress, the right way to do their hair, the right way to hold themselves, the right way to talk at parties without adding much substance might.

So where does that leave us Katies of the world? The natural answer is to avoid guys like Hubble forever, but it’s not that simple. When someone beautiful and charming casts their light on you like that, it’s hard to ignore. Like Katie, it’s hard to imagine life with them being anything but wonderful and perfect. After all, why shouldn’t being in love with someone beautiful and charming who sees you and loves you for who you are be wonderful and perfect?

It doesn’t make sense, and yet it does. Men like that don’t want women like us. This movie wasn’t afraid to say it and we shouldn’t either. It doesn’t mean that the Hubbles of the world are inherently bad or that the Katies of the world are doomed (although let’s not forget that Hubble fully abandons his child forever???), it just means, 99.99% of the time, these relationships won’t work out. It’s not fair. It shouldn’t be this way, and yet it is. We don’t have the right style and we never will.

There’s a reason Leonardo DiCaprio only dates models under 25. There’s a reason Republican politicians’ wives are never seen with a hair out of place and walk effortlessly in stilettos. The women that have a more natural affinity to a traditional gender role get to be with the highest status men. It’s probably for the best that the Katies don’t usually end up with the Hubbles, there are way nicer and better options out there (I’ve heard), but the flaw in this system is that as women we’ve always been socialized to believe that the basis of any romantic relationship is love.

Katie loved Hubble. Hubble loved Katie! But it wasn’t enough. Falling for someone, loving someone, and them loving you does not automatically mean that they want to be with you. And as women who were once girls fed fairy tales about men who’d take your lost shoe through the entire kingdom because he caught feels at the Ball, it doesn’t seem fair (though if Cinderella started talking about her Marxist ideals, maybe Prince Charming would have turned into a pumpkin too). It’s hard to rationalize. As a woman who loves romance, it’s hard to understand that falling in love can be the end of a relationship, not the beginning.

Hubble was never going to opt into a happily ever after with Katie because she wasn’t the right kind of woman for him. And while it’s ultimately his loss, and Katie, thankfully, gets to be herself and thrive without being self-conscious about how it affects Hubble, she also lives with the understanding that their connection was special, and they could’ve had a wonderful life together if only he could get out of his own way.