Why Gen Z Needs Rom-Coms

And My New Book in the Works!

Dear Truth Fairy Readers,

I’m excited to report that I’m hard at work on a new book—about why the dating and mating life of the rising generation veered so desperately off course, and what we can do to steer it back.

If you’re a young person on the dating market (or the parent of one), please get in touch! I’m excited to talk to you.

xo,

Abigail

p.s.

Mrs. Vanderwalde, my middle school sex ed teacher, began class by instructing us to introduce ourselves to each other according to our genitalia. “Hello, Penis, I am Vagina…” The point, ostensibly, was to force us to become comfortable with these terms. Instead, we shivered with giggles.

No class, as far as I’m aware, taught teens of the Nineties a thing about actual romance or relationships. For that, we had rom-coms….Here’s my tribute to the best of them all.

We teens of the ’90s remember sex education as an awkward mash-up of epidemiology and fluid mechanics: grim admonitions about HIV and spermicidal gels, the perils of the pullout method, and the disaster of double-condoming. For traversing the landscape of romantic relationships, we got no direction. For that, we had rom-coms.

Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles offered a delicate blueprint for attracting the right boy and gently turning the wrong one down. Pretty Woman left us with the rapturous sense that we knew the pain of being a hooker in love—but also, that it’s never too late for a woman to realize her own worth.

We call rom-coms “porn for women” (as if men are the measure of all things sexual), but that isn’t quite right. The rom-com’s journey is measured in hours, offering us so much more than a quick, empty jolt. Porn is a one-night stand, functional and forgotten—the rom-com is true love.

Porn is a one-night stand, functional and forgotten—the rom-com is true love.

My sophomore year of college, I returned to campus after winter break before my friends showed up, and took myself to the theater to see Good Will Hunting. I was instantly grateful that I’d seen it for the first time alone. Its lesson seemed too precious to share—that love entails mutual acceptance of emotional risk. The summer I studied for the LSAT and roomed with my cousin, I rewound Notting Hill so many times, she eventually gifted me the VHS tape.

“You seem to need this more than I do,” she said.

But with apologies to that film’s gifted writer, Richard Curtis, my decades of rom-com benders have led me to this conclusion: Nora Ephron is hands down the genre’s greatest screenwriter and When Harry Met Sally. . . is its pièce de résistance.

The 1989 film begins, of course, when Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) meets Sally Albright (Meg Ryan). Recent graduates of the University of Chicago, they are connected by a mutual friend to share the burden of an 18-hour drive to New York. Immediately, the car mates repel each other with the force of two same-pole magnets. Harry is pushy, imperious, cynical but also voracious. His overriding creed is: Go for it. Sally is sentimental, and tightly wound. She carries hair spray in her bag to smooth flyaways before dinner. When Harry calls her “Miss Hospital Corners” and accuses her of never yet having had any great sex, the jabs land.

The movie quickly shifts to five years later, then five years after that, with Harry and Sally bumping into each other as their various romantic relationships with others dissolve. By now, Harry knows the feel of cold concrete under his jeans and sand in the eyes: A brutal divorce has knocked him on his ass. Sally has spent years living with a man, Joe, who ultimately didn’t want to marry her. She and Joe break up, and Sally tells herself she feels fine about it. She falls into friendship with Harry, and gradually, they offer each other their unvarnished selves. We, the viewers, can barely stop ourselves from screaming at the screen: You’re meant for each other!

Eventually, it dawns on Harry that the woman he loves most has been staring him in the face. He barrels through the streets of Manhattan to find her at a New Year’s party. Harry arrives at the black-tie affair out of place and out of breath, in a bomber jacket and jeans, to tell Sally he loves her.

Of course, she doesn’t believe him. And so, Harry offers up rom-com’s most cherished monologue:

I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it’s not because I’m lonely, and it’s not because it’s New Year’s Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

It’s one of cinema’s iconic confessions of love, bombarding the female limbic system. This is the way every woman wants to be loved: just as she is.

When we were still just engaged to be married, I dialed my husband from the parking lot of my law firm, crying because I had scraped yet another parked car. The prospect of having to find the car’s owner and apologize, at my new place of employment, seemed humiliating. Not to mention the cost.

“I don’t even know why you want to marry me,” I remember saying.

“Are you kidding?” A smile crept into his voice. “I’ve already created a little account, so you can hit all the parked cars you want.”

“I’m a terrible driver,” I said.

“But only under five miles per hour. At normal speeds, you’re completely average.”

I was already laughing. There, the singular pleasure of being loved by the right man. But then, I came of age before every woman was expected to be a Girlboss—when women didn’t think it was denigrating to let men comfort us. When we still thought it was okay to need them.

I came of age before every woman was expected to be a Girlboss—when women still thought it was okay to need men.

Mine is just one version of a love story repeated over generations. Harry and Sally’s another. The film leans into this idea, interspersing scenes in which fictional elderly couples tell the story, documentary style, of how they met. There is the Asian man who tells the story of his arranged marriage: how he sneaked into her village and stood behind a tree, risking a beating, to catch a glimpse of his intended. A Jewish immigrant tells the story of seeing a beautiful girl walk into a cafeteria and telling his friend: “You see that girl? I’m going to marry her.”

Every story involves daring, chance, and above all, serendipity. Love, we are reminded again and again, is ultimately an act of surrender. Which is perhaps why our Buy-with-One-Click era struggles when it comes to romance, why its technological wizardry invariably comes up short. We shop for mates online like we shop for clothing, determined to call up precisely and exclusively what we’ve already decided will please us. But real love can’t be Prime-delivered like toilet paper. The precondition for romance—and especially, of marriage—is our willingness to move beyond consumption. To shift our focus from “I need a foodie who loves rock climbing” to imagining what you might give to another and create together.

Sally would never have matched with Harry on Hinge. Height alone would likely have pre-weeded him. He is of slim build and average looks. Nothing like the boyfriend who wouldn’t commit to marrying her—tall, agreeable, blond, newscaster-handsome Joe.

But rom-coms exist to remind us that we don’t know everything, not even about what we need—and that intimacy, like humor, involves surprise. Which also means we must each be open to finding someone who isn’t simply a reflection of ourselves. That is the question When Harry Met Sally. . . wrestles with: Can we let go of me long enough to be a worthy mate for someone else? Harry must relinquish some of his rigidity and pessimism. Sally must update her romantic priors: The guy she always pictured herself with who doesn’t exist—and if he did, wouldn’t make her happy. What we want or need from another is not something we can know a priori: Only experience reveals it.

Rom-coms exist to remind us that we don’t know everything, not even about what we need—and that intimacy, like humor, involves surprise.

In the absence of rom-coms—it’s been 15 years since Hollywood made a great one—no one tells young people what they most need to hear. You don’t know yourself as well as you might think. Give someone else a chance. By all means, study hard, travel, find a good job, have mimosas with friends. But don’t mistake subplot for storyline. When love arrives, drop whatever you were doing, grab an Uber, take the first flight out. Life is not the backdrop to your career, and love isn’t an accessory. It’s an adventure.

You’ll want to start it as soon as possible.

Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.