A Little RomCom on Valentine's Day

I've been watching a lot of bad romantic comedies. The husband is away today on business, and I find myself alone on Valentine's Day with epic plans to catch up on some reading, ordering Thai food, and grabbing a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Yep, cliche, but I'm giving myself the day off from worrying about calories and exercise and trying to find my abs back. Totally excited.

So, I'm trying to catch up on the chick flicks that I really haven't watched over the past eight or nine years because they are all on basic cable right now. I used to like a good romantic comedy that was actually funny. Sure, there's a formula: Boy meets girl, obsticle to happiness of boy and girl comes up, obsticle is overcome, climaxing in boy and girl declaring their love in public. Some witty banter between boy and girl should occur, along with a smart story as to why we're putting ourselves through the next 90 minutes. What I've found is that there's something pretty horrible about the movies that I'm watching. "Liberated" modern career women spend their entire lives pining and obsessing over men and expensive shoes. Then, the height of romance occurs when a man proposes to a woman in a lavish display or a gigantic Kardashian style wedding. End of story.

What I want to see is a good love story in which the boy and girl live happily ever after, where the wedding was just the start of the romance, not the end. Looking back over the last 20 years of cinema, I think I found one instance, from Four Weddings and a Funeral:



This is what I want to believe... the romance continues, the love deepens. No, magical fountains will not cause Danny DeVito to fall for you, nor will sitting around with bartenders explaining why He's Just Not Into You will make him fall for you. I find it a little funny that the best example in a mainstream romantic comedy of the type of love that I want is between two gay men, with the big public outpouring of love is at the end of one's life. Compare that scene to a rose ceremony in The Bachelor.