Movie Characters Who Said "I Love You" Way, Way Too Quickly, Ranked By How Fast They Said It
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: none.
In what simply must be a record, Ariel (Jodi Benson) tells her father she loves Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) before she even meets him. To be fair, they do make physical contact once before she confesses her love for him; she saves him from drowning. And he does technically see her, even if it was in a delirious, oxygen-deprived state. Still, the couple doesn't even exchange pleasantries before Ariel tells her father she loves him.
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 12 hours.
On the way to Elsa's coronation, Anna (Kristen Bell) meets the dashing Prince Hans (Santino Fontana) but quickly has to run after an awkward introduction. That evening after the coronation, the two dance and sing a song called "Love is an Open Door," which culminates with Hans saying, "Can I say something crazy? Will you marry me?" Anna responds, "Can I say something even crazier? Yes!"
At least they both recognize how absurd the notion is. They rush off to ask Queen Elsa's blessing, who of course denies it due to the fact they are practically strangers. Anna says that doesn't matter because it's true love, which in her mind only takes 12 hours to blossom.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 12 hours.
When Loretta (Cher) meets Ronny (Nicolas Cage) – the estranged brother of her fiancé – he threatens to kill himself in front of her due his strained relationship with his sibling. Loretta invites Ronny up to her apartment to console him and cook for him, and a heated argument ends with Ronny kissing her. One thing leads to another, and the couple finds themselves in bed together.
The next morning, Ronny tells Loretta he is falling in love with her. A few weeks later, Loretta's fiancé calls off the marriage, at which point Ronny (again, his brother) immediately proposes, and she accepts. That's amore!
Rose And Finn In 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 24 hours.
Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) is quite infatuated with Finn (John Boyega) when she meets him – until he tries to jump ship, that is. Her feelings quickly flip and she starts to harbor a burning hatred for him. Still, she is on a mission, and she convinces Finn to stay with the rebellion.
Antics ensue as they attempt to destroy the First Order's tracking device, and Rose saves Finn's life during a critical battle. With adrenaline running high, Rose tells Finn she loves him. Rose goes from crushing on Finn to absolutely hating his guts to professing her love for him, all within a 24-hour time span.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 24 hours.
David Huxley (Cary Grant) is an engaged paleontologist who meets Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) the day before his wedding. Susan immediately takes a liking to David, so she incites a series of shenanigans, ultimately landing the two in jail and causing David to miss his nuptials.
At the end of the film, Susan visits David at the museum and he promptly confesses his love for her. He says the day the spent in jail together was the best day of his life – emphasis on day; they knew each other for a whopping 24 hours, and that was enough to convince David she was the one for him.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 24 hours, not including altered time.
This one is a little complicated on account of the space-time continuum being repeatedly adjusted, but the eventual romance between Phil (Bill Murray) and Rita (Andie MacDowell) still presents a problem. While Phil relives the day countless times, Rita has really only experienced it once. When the film concludes with Phil taking Rita on a date, he sculpts her face out of snow and tells her he could have done it with his eyes closed. He then confesses her love for her, and she is all giddy about it.
Outside of Movie World, any other woman's response to this act would likely be straight terror. Phil would seem like an insane, obsessed stalker, since he openly admits to knowing her face better than anything in the world.
Now, Phil could have lived lifetimes for all we know, so it's not unreasonable for him to love Rita. What's unreasonable is for her to return that love, which is implied since she didn't run in horror from his admission of love. As far as she knows, this guy was a miserable coworker – now he loves her, and she's cool with it.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 36 hours.
Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets Céline (Julie Delpy) on a train to Vienna and the two hit it off. They end up wandering around the city for the entire night until they sleep together. The next morning Jesse needs to catch a flight back to the States, but he tells Céline if he had to choose between never seeing her again and marrying her, he'd choose the latter – 24 hours after they met.
He ends up getting on the plane, but they promise to meet back there in six months. Skip ahead nine years to the sequel, Before Sunset, which sees Jesse return to Europe, now a successful author. At a press event in Paris, he sees Céline in the crowd, and the two spend the day together. Jesse is now married with a son, but he decides to skip his flight home. The movie ends with the two dancing.
At this point, Jesse has known Céline for less than 36 hours cumulatively. They never explicitly say "I love you," to one another, but he's already told her he'd marry her, and it's heavily implied he leaves his wife and son for her – pretty much an admission of love. In fact, he does leave his wife, as revealed in the sequel Before Midnight.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 72 hours.
John (Owen Wilson) meets Claire (Rachel McAdams) at her sister's wedding and befriends the whole family, earning him and his fellow crasher, Jeremy, an invite to the family estate for a weekend hang.
As the weekend comes to a close, John tells Claire not to marry her jerk of a fiancé because he's fallen in love with her. Despite knowing each other for only a weekend, plus the reveal of the whole crashing-weddings-with-fake-identities-to-get-laid thing, Claire and John do eventually end up together.
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: three to four days.
It's not explicitly said, but it seems the events of Beauty and the Beast take place over the course of just a couple days. The Beast (Robby Benson) imprisons Belle (Paige O'Hara) when she comes to his castle to rescue her father Maurice. Maurice returns to the village, but Gaston threatens to have him thrown in an insane asylum if Belle won't marry him.
Meanwhile, Belle and the Beast have been quickly falling for each other. When Belle sees that her father is in trouble again via a magic mirror, Beast decides to let her return to him. Gaston leads a mob to the castle to kill the Beast and nearly succeeds. Belle cries over an almost dead Beast, confesses her love, and breaks the spell, transforming him back into a studly Disney prince.
There are a lot of moving pieces here – the largest of which is the fact that many consider Beauty and the Beast a problematic romanticization of Stockholm syndrome – but even if Belle wasn't Beast's prisoner, their love timeline is still ridiculously fast.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: four days.
The Titanic disembarked on April 10, 1912, and hit the fateful iceberg at 11:40 PM on April 14, meaning that anyone who met on the ship knew each other for a maximum of four days. This is just as true for Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) as it is for anyone else.
So Rose, who is engaged at the time (admittedly to a rich prat), tells Jack she loves him after four days together. Now, considering Jack's death was imminent when she said it, she gets a little bit of a break, but still, four days.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: one week.
This movie takes place over the course of spring break in Miami where Justin (Justin Guarini) and Kelly (Kelly Clarkson) meet. Towards the end of their week together, they sing a duet, a song called "Anytime," which includes lines like "just hold onto my love and let me give you more" and "anytime you need love, baby I'm on your side."
While they don't actually say "I love you" at any point, obviously the lyrics to that song allude to the emotion; they basically confess their love for one another within a week of meeting.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: one week.
After call girl Vivian (Julia Roberts) spends one week with a hot-shot lawyer, Edward (Richard Gere), she breaks her "no kissing rule," and kisses him when they sleep together. This turns out to be a mistake, as Vivian discovers via this one kiss that she is definitely in love with Edward. She admits this to him, but he does not reciprocate the sentiment.
This is not the fairy tale ending Vivian wants, so she leaves and packs up to go to San Francisco. Edward realizes after one week that she is the woman of his dreams, so he climbs up her building's fire escape ladder, rose in mouth, and woos her.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: 10 days.
This one's a bit tricky, because we never actually hear Andie (Kate Hudson) and Ben (Matthew McConaughey) explicitly say "I love you" to one another (at least not earnestly; Andie does it after a couple of days, but it's all part of her ruse). However, we do catch a glimpse of the article Andie writes at the end of the film, in which she admits, "I lost the only guy I've ever fallen for."
The phrase "fallen for" is simply a truncated version of the phrase "fallen in love." Instead of losing a guy in 10 days, Andie falls in love with one in that time allotment and essentially says as much.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: two weeks.
Amanda (Cameron Diaz) just needs to escape the rat race of LA (not to mention her adulterous boyfriend), so she heads to a little cottage in Surrey to spend the holidays alone. She gets bored after a few hours but fortunately, a drunk but handsome guy she's never met named Graham (Jude Law) shows up at her door. Naturally, they get intimate.
Amanda's getaway is only scheduled for two weeks, and the two spend some more quality time together. The day before her flight home, Graham confesses his love for her.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: five weeks.
For five weeks, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz), who speaks Portuguese, works as Jamie's (Colin Firth) maid and the two somehow grow fond of each other despite not speaking the same language, almost literally never exchanging words because they can't. Of course, Jamie recognizes this for what it is: true love.
After she's moved on from her duties as a maid, she goes to work as a waitress in France. Jamie learns a smattering of Portuguese so he can go to her restaurant and propose, and she accepts.
The list of things these two know about each other: their names, end of list. The two spent five silent weeks together before Jamie proposed. To be fair, they never actually exchanged "I love yous," but doesn't that just make it more messed up?
Pretty much any romance in this movie would qualify as moving too quickly, as they're virtually all about a month long.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: a little over a month.
Sutter (Miles Teller) is a troubled high school senior who drinks too much. When his girlfriend breaks up with him, he gets blasted and wakes up the next morning on his classmate's lawn, a girl he doesn't know named Aimee (Shailene Woodley). A typically hyperbolic high school romance ensues, and somewhere around a month or so later Aimee tells Sutter she loves him. To be fair, this probably isn't all that uncommon by high school standards.
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: a month or two, tops.
On Christmas Day, Lucy (Sandra Bullock) saves Peter Callaghan from being hit by a train, but he's put into a coma as a result of the incident. At the hospital, Lucy's mistaken for Peter's fiancée, so she's allowed to see him. His family then shows up, and she's too embarrassed to tell them the truth and continues to pose as his future wife.
Over the next week, she gets to know Peter's brother, Jack (Bill Pullman), and the two fall for each other despite her pseudo-engagement to his brother. The charade continues all the way up to the wedding day – the date of which is unclear – but it's likely within a month or two tops. Lucy objects to her own union, confessing to the family that she's actually in love with Jack and comes clean about the whole situation. She leaves, an undisclosed amount of time passes, then Jack shows up at her place of work with the whole family to propose.
The only time we see Lucy and Jack spend together is between Christmas and New Year's Eve, so they apparently fall in love within a week. Then comes Lucy's actual admission of love during the wedding, again, most likely within a month or two. So even if you want to be generous and say it's a couple of months, Jack still proposes to a woman who conned his entire family into believing she was engaged to his brother.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: three months, tops.
The timeline of Silver Linings Playbook isn't specifically stated, but Pat (Bradley Cooper) meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) during the NFL season, and their dance competition happens at the end of that same year. That means they know each other for three months at most before he hands her a letter confessing that he loved her since the moment he first saw her.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: three to four months.
Edward Scissorhands (Johnny Depp) is a nice, artificially created human with very pointy appendages. When he moves in with the Boggses, it's no surprise that the teenage Kim (Winona Ryder) grows fond of him. Edward lives with the family for a few months and Kim's boyfriend, Jim, becomes jealous of Kim's affection for Edward.
It all culminates with a showdown at Edward's old mansion. Jim threatens the harmless Edward with a gun, and when Jim slaps Kim as she tries to intervene, Edward becomes enraged and stabs him in the stomach, pushing him out the window to his death. Kim immediately embraces Edward and confesses her love for him.
- Photo:
Time elapsed before the L-bomb is dropped: a couple of months.
Fans of Jerry Maguire may cite the "You complete me" scene as one of the most romantic in rom-com history, which comes only months after the main character, Jerry (Tom Cruise), has known Dorothy (Renée Zellweger. It's not only Jerry's final speech that makes this romance feel rushed; it's his entire relationship with Dorothy. He proposes to her a few months after his engagement falls apart, which is also the total amount of time he has really known Dorothy.
