Nollywood romance movies like to introduce themselves as soft, gentle, healing. The kind of films you’re supposed to watch with tea, dim lights, and an open heart.
That is a lie.
Most Nollywood romance movies are not relaxing, they are emotionally aggressive. You don’t finish them feeling warm, you finish them tired, slightly irritated. Sometimes questioning your own judgment and past decisions.
And the worst part is how normal we’ve made it.
In many of these stories, love is not peaceful, love is loud, love is stressful, love is endurance. If the relationship is not actively hurting someone, the film treats it like it lacks depth.
The formula is familiar. One person is emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, or outright disrespectful, and the other person is patient to the point of self-erasure. Instead of calling this imbalance what it is, the movie frames it as “true love,” “fate,” or “they just need time.”
Time to do what exactly. Heal trauma they refuse to acknowledge.
Conflict is necessary in storytelling, yes, but Nollywood romance often mistakes emotional neglect for tension and suffering for passion. The more stressed the characters are, the more convinced we’re supposed to be that the love is real.
Healthy relationships don’t get enough screen time because they don’t scream, they don’t involve dramatic walkouts, public humiliation, or last-minute confessions that magically erase months of bad behavior. They are steady, they are communicative, and apparently, they are “boring.”
So instead, we get romance that feels like emotional cardio.
Characters forgive too easily, boundaries are treated like obstacles to overcome instead of lines to respect, apologies are rushed, if they exist at all, accountability is implied, not demonstrated. And by the end, we’re expected to clap because love “won.”
But what exactly won.
A big reason these films feel stressful is because they ask the audience to do emotional labor the characters refuse to do. We’re constantly filling gaps, making excuses, hoping for growth that never actually happens on screen. By the time the happy ending arrives, it feels unearned, like emotional debt that was never paid off.
And still, we watch.
This doesn’t mean Nollywood shouldn’t tell complicated love stories, it should. Love is kind but can get messy, relationships fail, people hurt each other. But there’s a difference between portraying emotional struggle and romanticizing emotional harm.
The problem isn’t that these movies show pain, the problem is how often they reward it.
When suffering becomes proof of love, stress becomes a requirement. When endurance replaces mutual effort, exhaustion gets mistaken for devotion. And when peace finally arrives at the very end, it feels less like growth and more like relief that the movie is over.
Maybe that’s why so many Nollywood romance films leave us unsettled. Not because love is hard, but because the version of love we’re being sold keeps asking us to suffer quietly and call it depth.
Love stories don’t have to feel like survival stories to be meaningful.
Sometimes, the most radical romance is the one that lets its characters rest.
And honestly, we deserve to see more of that.