Do you believe love should have a happy ending? Romantic comedies have a lot more going for them when it comes to what we seek as human beings. Tragic love just leaves us sad and empty.

True love should be uplifting. It should be an intermingling of two souls full of joy and laughter. Romantic comedies give audiences a taste of what real love is, it is about laughing at ourselves and growing together. It is not like those tragic tales of love where they can never be together because of death, war or the marriage of either protagonist. Besides, true love should have a happy ending, and why not? It is what we are constantly looking for as spiritual beings in these human forms.

Take for example one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, “It Happened One Night,” (1934) starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable.

The story is about a rich heiress, and a regular guy or “everyman.” Clark Gable plays a starving reporter who discovers that the girl he is traveling with on a bus is actually a famous girl who is running away from her father and the establishment, seeking to be her own person. Gable sticks to her like glue for the “story” and between wise cracks and enlightening moments of each other’s strengths and weaknesses the two fall in love. That movie is a perfect example of how love is supposed to be – uplifting, with an overall “feel good” deep down.

On the other hand, we have the tragic tale of “Casablanca.” Hailed as one of the greatest love stories of all time, and greatest movies, it involves a love triangle that ends in nobility, but leaves us with longing.

Humphrey Bogart plays the allegedly apolitical club owner in unoccupied French territory that is nevertheless crawling with Nazis; Ingrid Bergman is the lover who mysteriously deserted him in Paris; and Paul Heinreid is her heroic, slightly bewildered husband. The passion between the two lovers perhaps lifts us into a swirling hurricane of want, but in the end, it comes, crashing down when Humphrey decides that it is better to follow what is nobly and morally correct. He kisses Ingrid and sends her back to her husband.

Although this movie is great, I do not believe it shows what true love is all about. Because in the end, the guy always gets the girl, and vice a versa, and everyone lives happily ever after. At least until the laundry and dishes pile up, but then that is a whole other movie.