An inconvenient truth: Love is weird and everything is Romeo and Juliet

In reality, the movie Once is just Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Two people fall in love but the guy used to be in love with another woman and the woman is either married or engaged to be married to another man, the only difference is that instead of dying in the end, our irish Romeo gets on a plane, while Juliet gets a piano... that she then plays for her husband. Basically, it's just a story of star crossed lovers who weren't meant to find each other, but they did, and then couldn't be together in the end because of odd circumstances. The resounding them in both productions is about them being uncomfortable and trying to figure how they fit together but not really succeeding because they are just too damn awkward. Romeo and Juliet are so bumbling when they first meet that they just touch hands and stare at each other, this sense of being clumsy and inept continues throughout the book with them always sort of rushing into things unplanned and then mis-communicating with each other so things get messed up (ie their deaths).The two main characters in Once never really have a smooth conversation, everything is coarse and weird, even the way they look at each other makes the audience feel uncomfortable.But I guess that these qualities are supposed to be endearing and give the characters a sense of reality, because "love" is supposed to weird and icky, just ask any ten year old. 

Another example of this is The Cathedral by Raymond Carver, which is quite possibly one of THE most uncomfortable things I have ever read. But through the clumsy encounters of a man, his wife, and his wife's blind friend, we are supposed to see how much they really care about each other. You could argue that this short story also has hints of Romeo and Juliet sprinkled in it, the blind man and his deceased wife Beulah, or the man and his wife, or the wife and the blind man, or even the blind man and the husband. They all have an element of not really knowing how to react around a person that by some stroke of luck has fallen into your life to change the path you were previously travelling on. Furthermore, all of these Romeo and Juliet like scenarios have this theme of finding someone who is equally as bizarre as you are, and then preceding to be bizarre with them.  

So, I guess, this means that love is weird and therefore every love story should technically have elements of Romeo and Juliet. This makes logical sense if you think about it, seeing as how we've already proven that Shakespeare's famous play was all about being awkward and love is supposedly supremely awkward. If this is true though, it would mean that you could never write a love story that isn't a cliche because they would all just be Romeo and Juliet, a hefty implication indeed. But really, we must admit that love is pretty cliched itself and ridiculously over used most of the time. In conclusion, Once and The Cathedral are just copies of an old love tale, with somewhat modern twists.