Katie, the female protagonist played by Barbra Streisand in the 1973 romance film The Way We Were, is presumably the subject speaking the lines from the film's theme song. In the song, she expresses ambivalence about the role of time in the process of making sense of romance. She suggests that events from the past, in this case, a romance from the past, can only be seen via ‘misty water-colored memories,’ which obscure the clarity of the events as they really occurred and diminish the intensity of the emotion that accompanied them. She goes on to question, ‘Could it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line?’ suggesting the muddled distinction between a memory of the past as it really happened, and the sort of revisionism inherent in recollection that transforms the historical and personal past to fit one's own present subjectivity.

This notion of ‘the way we were’ suggests that romance is simultaneously specific and universal, timely and timeless. It is a form that has remained constant throughout history but that has also maintained its ability to reveal a great deal about historically specific social and political tensions, particularly those that hold significant ramifications for women such as Katie, who is representative of both the primary players as well as the primary consumers of romantic fantasies. The song's expression of ambivalence toward time and its close association of fictional subject Katie with real person Barbra Streisand bring to mind Chapter 2's discussion of the postfeminist romance's proclivity to break down distinctions between fiction and reality and past and present.