Love Letter to the Rom Com

When I was younger, my mom and I would stay inside for an entire Saturday watching rom coms. In the morning, we’d walk to the movie rental store and leave with a paper bag full of laminated DVDs, giddy in anticipation of watching incompatible people find love in low rise jeans. Flashes of J Lo, Vince Vaughn, Cameron Diaz, Matthew McConaughey reflected off our glassy eyes for seven hours straight. 

I recently read that the romantic comedy is officially a dead genre. America is socially polarized, and those narratives just aren’t believable anymore. And it’s true: the crux of every romantic comedy is the idea that love prevails—even when it’s the love between the most unlikely partners. They were never supposed to work out but they were in love, and that’s what mattered.

My dad, a professor who is obsessed with productivity, would scorn my mom and me for spending an entire day inside watching movies. He would say that they were forgotten days and that our brains were turning to mush. 

I’ve indeed forgotten a lot of things about my adolescence. But the days that remain crystallized in my memory are those with my mother, feet up on our velvet green couch, watching Reese, and Drew and Meg fall in love.