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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Catherine Shoard

Sex, sleep and scrolling: real reasons men watch romantic movies, according to survey

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in Crazy, Stupid, Love, whose title may have put off male viewers.
Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in Crazy, Stupid, Love, whose title may have put off male viewers. Photograph: Maximum Film/Alamy

As groups of women block-booking rows of seats with friends to see Wuthering Heights look likely to help propel Emerald Fennell’s adaptation to the top of the Valentine’s weekend box office, a new survey suggests men are amenable to watching romantic movies at home – although their motivations for doing so are mixed.

A poll of 2,000 film fans on behalf of the wall-to-wall romance movie Freeview channel Great Romance has found that the top three reasons given by men for watching a romance film are feeling closer to their partner (36%), wanting a quiet life (21%) and thinking it might lead to sex (20%). Twenty per cent said that such films “remind me of the magic of when we met”, while half that number said such an activity was “low effort but still feels like bonding”.

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