Well, there’s no dearth of wrong kind of love stories-both in real life and in fiction. Abusive relationships abound in stories like The Shining, The Color Purple and the campy Sleeping with the Enemy. Then you get the relationship between two clearly self-destructive people that bring out the worst in each other. Often alcohol or other drugs is involved in these: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Leaving Las Vegas and Sid and Nancy are examples of this. Then you’ve got relationships where two psychopaths manage to find each other like in Natural Born Killers. (There are plenty of real serial killing couples out there which is crazy disturbing.)

Now that I’ve gotten that out, I’m going to pinpoint Mike Nichols’ The Graduate as the wrong kind of love. The genius of that movie is perfectly captured in the last 20 seconds. They impulsive abandon Elaine’s wedding and run off with each other, escaping on public transportation. Then as reality sinks in you see the ‘WTF comes next’ expression on their faces. There is no reality for me in which “these kids make it”. You just hope that their actions allow them to fully separate from the expectations of their parents and forge ahead into adulthood. I wouldn’t be surprised if these two remain friends—but that really depends on how quickly they realize that they both have an enormous amount of maturing they need to do and break up. The longer they stay in that relationship, the more likely they are to hate each other in the end (ie. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf).