One common emotional goal is the “Find love” emotional logline where the hero searches for true love. Everyone can understand the desire to find true love so the dilemma looks like this:
The hero searches for true love with no guarantee of getting it vs. The hero settles for something less than true love which is easier to get
This dilemma works on both the hero and the hero’s true love as both are torn apart by the need to find each other (their true love) while also being pulled away to settle for something less than true love because it’s easier and more convenient to get.
The key to the “Find love” emotional logline is to keep the hero and their true love apart for as long as possible. The two ways to do that include:
- A villain (often an innocent person in love with the hero and another innocent person in love with the hero’s true love)
- An unusual situation that’s keeping the hero and their true love apart
This is how the following “Find love” emotional loglines work in different movies:
“The Little Mermaid”
- Villain – The Sea Witch who steals the hero’s voice to seduce the hero’s true love into marrying her instead of the hero, Ariel
- Unusual situation – Ariel is actually a mermaid and her true love is human
“Sleepless in Seattle”
- Villain – The hero’s true love is engaged to marry another man while the hero is lonely and starts dating a woman who’s convenient and wants the hero
- Unusual situation – The hero lives in Seattle and his true love lives in Baltimore
“WALL-E”
- Villain – The villain is the auto-pilot computer, which wants to destroy the hero and his true love to keep the human race marooned in space forever
- Unusual situation – The hero is a sentient robot who lives on a desolate Earth while his true love is a more advanced sentient robot who lives in an advanced starship
“The Proposal”
- Villain – The villain is an immigration agent who wants to deport the hero from America
- Unusual situation – The hero will get deported from America unless she can pretend she’s actually engaged to marry her American assistant
The villain actively tries to keep the hero apart from their true love while the environment tries to passively keep the hero apart from their true love. To triumph, the hero must overcome both the villain and their unusual environment that’s keeping them from their true love.
The Rock Bottom moment occurs when the hero appears completely cut off from their true love because their true love is committed to someone else and because the environment works to keep the hero and their true love separate forever.
In “Sleepless in Seattle”, the hero is in Seattle and his true love is in New York with her fiancé.
In “Pretty Woman”, the hero has paid for his true love’s services as a prostitute and let her go back home without knowing where she lives or how to get in touch with her again.
In “WALL-E”, the villain has thrown both the hero, WALL-E, and his true love, Eve in the trash to get ejected out in space. In addition, the villain has also damaged WALL-E so he can barely move.
In “The Little Mermaid”, the villain, the Sea Witch, plans to marry the hero’s true love.
Find all the ways it will be impossible for the hero to reunite with their true love and that’s the Rock Bottom moment your story needs to create the maximum amount of despair and anguish right up until the hero finds a way to overcome these problems and reunite with their true love after all.
The basic pattern of the “Find love” emotional logline looks like this:
- The hero is lonely through no fault of their own and yearns to find true love
- The hero and true love get together and almost stay together as true lovers
- An outsider (often the villain) threatens to keep the hero and their true love apart
- Something unusual is keeping the hero from finding their true love
- The hero takes a huge risk reuniting with their true love where failure or victory only has one chance to prevail
- The hero gets true love (or doesn’t)
In “The Shape of Water”, the hero is a deaf woman who works in a laboratory where she wants to find true love. That’s when she discovers that scientists have captured a reptile man that they’re keeping in the laboratory.
The hero befriends the reptile man and they start falling in love. That’s when the scientists plan to kill and dissect the reptile man to study his anatomy, so the hero takes a huge risk to smuggle the reptile man out of the laboratory and into her home.
Once in her home, the hero tries to keep the reptile man’s existence hidden but the authorities find him anyways and rush to recapture him. The hero helps the reptile man get back into the ocean where she jumps in the water and the reptile man helps create gills for her so she can stay underwater with him and the two of them can stay together in the ocean forever.
In “You’ve Got Mail”, the hero runs an independent bookstore and is friends with her true love online, even though they’ve never met. Because her true love runs a bookstore chain that puts independent bookstores out of business, the hero’s true love is reluctant to reveal his identity, which keeps the hero and her true love apart.
Despite this, the hero’s true love finds ways to meet and befriend the hero without revealing he’s the one she’s been chatting with online. When the hero’s true love’s bookstore finally puts the hero’s independent bookstore out of business, that’s when the hero’s relationship with their true love gets fractured.
Yet she still maintains her friendship with her true love online, not realizing the man online is the same person as the one who runs the book store chain that has put her independent bookstore out of business.
Finally, the hero decides she wants meet her true love in person, and that’s when she finally realizes the man she’s met online is the same man whose bookstore chain has put her independent bookstore out of business. Yet she realizes she was ready to move on from the bookstore business and decides to fall in love with her true love anyway.
In “The Proposal”, the hero is an arrogant and distasteful woman who doesn’t realize she needs to find true love. What makes her problem even harder is that she’s a Canadian in danger of being deported from America because she’s not a legal citizen and doesn’t have the proper paperwork to stay and work in America.
That’s when she comes up with a plan to pretend she’s engaged to her American assistant. Since her assistant wants to keep his job, he has to go along with her plan. Now under the farce of being engaged to an American, the hero hopes she can stay and work in America.
Of course, the only way she can continue working in America is if she keeps this farce going to allay the suspicions of an immigration agent. That forces the hero to meet her “fiancé’s” family to prepare for the wedding.
As the hero gets to know her “fiancé’s” unusual family and they embrace her, the hero starts to feel guilty for fooling them. On the verge of getting married, the hero finally admits her farce and leaves her wedding. Now she’s definitely going to get deported without the protection of being married to an American citizen.
Yet the hero and her “fiancé” actually started bonding and developing a true relationship during her time meeting his family. That’s when the hero’s true love professes his love for her and asks if they can try again.
This lets the hero stay in America as she finally finds true love.
The “Finding love” emotional logline is all about keeping the hero and their true love apart for as long as possible through both people opposing their union and a hostile environment working against the hero.
The unique way that the hero overcomes their hostile environment is what makes the “Finding love” emotional logline memorable and interesting.
(Updated versions of “The 15-Minute Movie Method“, “Story Starter“, “Emotional Log Lines” and “Writing Scenes For Screenplays” are now available on Amazon.)
