For millennials, 10 Things I Hate About You was something of a high school bible. I mean, are you even a 90s kid if you didn’t, at one point, pine over the dimpled grin of Heath Ledger’s Patrick or read The Bell Jar performatively during your lunch break in an attempt to channel Julia Stiles’s Kat? 

Get ready to feel old, though, because the teen romcom is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a rerelease in theatres this weekend. Based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew, 10 Things I Hate About You was the teen romance movie for an entire generation. Writers Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith updated the classic comedy, setting the scene in a Seattle high school. When new boy in town Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) falls for the popular, bubbly Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), he discovers that her overly protective father will only let her date if her older sister, Kat, is also dating at the same time. (It’s a very odd set-up; don’t overthink it!) Unfortunately, Kat is the school ‘shrew’ – prickly, pugnacious and, for most boys, utterly terrifying. So, Cameron orchestrates a plot: he will trick Joey, his rival in Bianca’s affections, into paying Patrick, the school bad boy, to date her. 

For those of us who grew up with 10 Things I Hate About You,  nothing was more romantic than the thought of the school bad boy serenading us with a goofy rendition of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You or kissing us after a paintball session in a pile of hay.  

Sure, 10 Things I Hate About You may be your classic high school movie fare, complete with the cliques, the iconic one-liners and the Hollywood happy ending – but it also manages to update what is arguably the most misogynistic of Shakespeare’s comedies into a romcom that prizes wisdom, honesty and equality in relationships. In fact, as a teen growing up in the early 2000s, it taught me a lot. Here are 10 things I learned about love from 10 Things I Hate About You.

1. We don’t really want the bad boys – we want the misunderstood boys

There’s a misconception that bad boys are what we all want. One of the biggest lessons of 10 Things I Hate About You is that while we might think we all have a thing for ‘bad boys’, Kat and Patrick’s love story teaches us that what we are really after is someone who is just a little misunderstood. After all, there’s something indescribably intimate about being the only one who gets to see someone let down their guard and reveal the soft side beneath their harsh exterior. 

2. The real bad boys are the ones who only care about themselves

While we might think of the ’bad boys’ as the ones who smoke outside of school and wear leather jackets, some of them have hearts of gold – and, as 10 Things I Hate About You reminds us, some of the boys who look the nicest can be the worst possible potential dates. Just take Joey, a walking red flag and narcissistic wannabe model who spends all of his time with Bianca showing off his (identical) modelling poses. Not only is he mind-numbingly boring, but it also turns out that his only reason for dating Bianca was to brag to his friends about sleeping with her at prom. Honestly? He deserved to be punched by her the day before his nose spray ad.

3. “You don’t always have to be who they want you to be”

This is something that Kat tells her sister, but the line could just as easily have been flipped. Everyone in this film is very, very busy acting out a role of who they think other people want them to be – even Kat, whose brash persona, it turns out, is something of an act to keep her classmates away. After all, high school is all about finding yourself and that often involves experimenting with different personalities. Ultimately, everyone relaxes into themselves by the end of the film, and – surprise, surprise – they are able to find love when they stop performing out high school tropes for the sake others. 

4. Sometimes, love can look pretty weird

As teenagers, most of us always had a very specific idea about what love would look like – it would be elegant, romantic, graceful, normal. 10 Things I Hate About You reminded us that couples can sometimes be, well… a little weird. Who could forget Mandela (Susan May Pratt), Kat’s Shakespeare-obsessed friend whose steamy relationship with Cameron’s friend Michael (David Krumholtz) involves him role-playing as the famous playwright himself at prom. Oh, and of course there’s Allison Janney as Ms Perky, the cheerful guidance counsellor who spends her time in between meetings writing her erotic novel. 10 Things I Hate About You reminds us – romance looks different to everyone and that’s more than OK.

5. “There’s a difference between like and love”

For instance, Bianca famously likes her Skechers but loves her Prada backpack.

Yes, this is an iconic line, but it has a deeper meaning, too. By the end of 10 Things I Hate About You, we realise that Bianca was right – there is a difference between like and love. High school is a time of crushes and fantasies – and while we might like a few classmates (see Bianca’s adolescent crush on Joey), love, especially the complicated love we have for our friends and families, runs much deeper.

6. Sometimes, a public serenade really is the ultimate gesture

Public serenades get a bad rap. After all, nothing is more embarrassing than watching someone humiliate themselves in public on your behalf. But in 10 Things I Hate About You, we get the example of the perfect serenade. Patrick’s rendition of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You on the bleachers, complete with corny dance moves, microphone and marching band, is the perfect mixture of self-deprecating, fun and heartfelt. It made us swoon then, and, 25 years later, it remains one of the best instances of the public serenade in cinematic history. 

7. Paintball is always an excellent date idea

It’s not an overstatement to say that 10 Things I Hate About You changed our cultural understanding of paintball forever. In case you’ve somehow forgotten, Kat and Patrick have a very cute spontaneous date at an outdoor paintball arena, where they run around, giggle and get very messy,= before collapsing in a hay bale and sharing their first kiss – the image of the paint-covered kiss has gone down in romcom history and was even mimicked in 2022’s Do Revenge. Looking back, it’s clear that the paintball kiss had such an impact on us because it was the first time we got to see Kat and Patrick get messy, have fun and be vulnerable with each other. 

8. The right person will want to know the real you – even if their interests don’t match yours

What made Patrick a truly elite romcom hero was how much interest he took in Kat. Although he initially wants to learn about her interests so that he can convince her to date him, when he begins to get to know the real her, he is fascinated by her – even though he doesn’t share her interest in feminist rock or fancy guitars, he makes an effort to find out who she really is. It’s a stark contrast to Joey who, it is very clear, has never asked anyone a single question about themselves ever.

9. Love and hate sometimes go hand-in-hand

The movie is called 10 Things I Hate About You for a reason – although Kat and Patrick do eventually fall in love, they spend a lot of the film kind of hating each other’s guts. The film reminds us that the people we love the most can sometimes drive us crazy. As Kat says at the end of her famous final speech, “I hate the way I don’t hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.” The same could be said for her relationship with her sister – although the pair are constantly at each other’s throats, at the end of the day, it’s because they love each other.

10. Romantic love isn’t everything

And that brings us to the final lesson. Ultimately, the greatest love story isn’t between Kat and Patrick, nor is it between Bianca and Cameron. Rather, it’s between the two sisters themselves. At the beginning of the movie, the pair seem to detest each other. While Bianca moans at her sister for not helping her get past their father’s bizarre dating rule, Kat mocks Bianca for caring about being popular. Bianca says things like, “Where did you come from? Planet Loser,” and Kat retorts things like, “As opposed to Planet Look At Me, Look At Me.” But, as the film goes on, the pair start to open up to each other a little more. Kat confesses that she was trying to protect Bianca from heartbreak. Bianca explains that she needs to experience both the highs and lows of high school for herself. They both start to see the other’s perspective. The pair finally get their own happy ending and learn to support and love each other despite their differences. Non-romantic love stories matter – it’s one lesson, 25 years later, that is still as important as ever.

Images: Getty; Rex Features