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I was 20, I didn’t question whether Jane had made the right decision. That Jane ended up unmarried and childless, well, I chalked that up to—get this—the filmmaker’s misogyny! I’m not kidding. I’m completely embarrassed by this now, but I actually had conversations with female friends about how Hollywood wasn’t ready to show a strong woman standing her ground without somehow punishing her for it. It never occurred to us that this was simply a likely outcome to Jane’s choice. In fact, many of us went through our twenties and thirties making that very same choice—Prince Charming or nobody!—and ending up single.

      What my friends and I called “misogyny” turned out to be “reality.”

      It wasn’t until I watched the DVD in my late thirties that I realized I’d become Jane, passing up the Aarons of the world only to appreciate too late that what I want most in a partner is an Aaron. But like Aaron in the film, those guys my friends and I passed up earlier had gotten married.

      At 20, I remember thinking that the saddest moment in the film was when Aaron confesses to Jane, “And I’m in love with you. How do you like that? I buried the lead.” My heart broke for Aaron.

      Two decades later, the saddest moment for me was when a heartbroken Aaron predicts the consequences of Jane’s rejecting him for the charming but shallow Tom: “Six years from now, I’ll be back here with my wife and two kids. And I’ll see you, and one of my kids will say, ‘Daddy, who is that?’ And I’ll say, ‘It’s not nice to point at single fat women.’ “ Now my heart broke for Jane. I knew how truthful Aaron’s cutting remark could be.

       A BETTER-LOOKING BILLY CRYSTAL

      A couple of years after Broadcast News came out, When Harry Met Sally hit theaters. This time, best friends do fall in love. There was something incredibly romantic about the idea of, Hey, wait a minute, take a second look at the guy who’s your buddy. But still, back in my twenties, I wasn’t interested in the Billy Crystals of my world. Again, stupidly, my friends and I considered this message insulting. Why should someone like Meg Ryan lower her standards? In real life, we asked, would someone as beautiful as Sally go for someone like Harry? Probably not. He’d have a crush on her, and she’d say she just wants to be friends.

      But in our “real-life” scenario, we didn’t think through what might happen next: She’d reject him and date more attractive men, while he’d go off and marry someone else. Maybe she’d find someone, but maybe she wouldn’t. Or maybe she would, but not someone she connects with as strongly as Harry, or not in time to have the children she wants.

      I had no sense of this when I was 22 years old and watched Sally sob to Harry, after she learns that her ex-boyfriend is getting married, “I’m going to be forty!” Harry reminds her that she’s only 32 years old and that 40 is eight years away, but Sally cries: “But it’s there, it’s just sitting there like a big dead end. It’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had babies when he was seventy-three.”

      At the time, the idea of being 40, much less 32, seemed eons away to me. I took it for granted that I’d be married by then. I never thought my life would be like Jane’s at the end of Broadcast News; I thought my life would be more like Sally’s, a wonderfully romantic story of best friends who fall in love, except it would happen at age 30, and I’d be married to a man I considered to be not just my best friend, but also incredibly sexy—a better-looking Billy Crystal, a smoother Albert Brooks. Quite an assumption, given that I look nothing like Meg Ryan and, on a good day, have maybe half the charm of Holly Hunter. But like many young women, I identified with Meg and Holly. Delusional as it sounds, when I was dating in my twenties, I thought my romantic prospects should be on par with theirs.

      And so did many of my friends. Sure, we would have denied it, but we would have been lying. We said we didn’t believe in the fairy tale, but when push came to shove, we wouldn’t settle for less than the fairy tale, either. We said we wanted true love, but we sought out romance and confused it with love. We knew that movies were fiction, but on some unconscious level, we watched them as if they were documentaries.

      As Allison, a single 38-year-old in Minneapolis wrote to me, “At twenty-seven, when I got into an argument with my boyfriend—who I loved—I was looking for the romantic comedy response. My mistake.” They broke up, and she regrets that decision. Now with no romantic prospects on deck, she was planning to get inseminated to become a mom on her own.

       BRIDEZILLA

      It’s not just movies, of course. There’s an entire industry devoted to fairy-tale weddings (which, incidentally, became a source of conflict in the hugely popular Sex and the City movie), and even the newspaper announcements themselves, with their over-the-top “we looked across the room and our eyes met instantly” stories, fuel the fantasy of what love is supposed to look like when we find it. But just as in the movies, these newspaper accounts—the so-called sports pages for women—never tell you what happens in the actual marriage.

      Elisa Albert, whose own wedding was featured in The New York Times, knows this all too well. As she put it: “My Times wedding announcement read, as so many do, like a smug sigh of relief.” What followed, though, was a train wreck of a relationship. She was separated within a year, and divorced shortly thereafter.

      In her essay in The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt, Albert describes her whirlwind romance leading up to the Times announcement, the fabulous and moving wedding ceremony, and the post-wedding reality that set in as she and her husband realized they were—and always had been—incompatible when it came to marriage. Just as it might be helpful if movies made sequels showing the couples’ marriages, Albert wishes that wedding columns would print “divorce announcements” as follow-ups to all the enviable romantic courtship stories. At least then, she believes, single people would have a better idea of what love is and isn’t.

      She has a point. I went through my twenties and thirties saying that I wanted true love, but how could I even know what that was? Married people rarely talk about the reality of their marriages with their single friends, and the only “love” stories most of us see onscreen are the kind where once a couple finally kisses after working out their conflict, it’s like a collective orgasm for the audience. After that, our interest in them deflates. The story’s over. We’re left to assume that these couples go on to happily ever after, but if the couple had so much trouble simply getting together, what makes us think they’ll have more success in holding a marriage together?

      You’re probably wondering why any of this matters in a book about finding the right guy. You’re probably wondering why I think anyone with half a brain is going to be influenced in their dating lives by movies or TV shows or romance novels or wedding announcements or the covers of People magazine. If you’d asked me years ago whether I thought this stuff influenced me, I would have rolled my eyes. I mean, we all know that even leading men don’t meet the leading man ideal in real life. (Remember Hugh Grant cheating on Elizabeth Hurley with a prostitute? How about Brad Pitt leaving Jennifer Aniston for his costar?) But then why do many of us overlook men who don’t fit a fantasy man ideal but who would make wonderful life partners?

      I thought about what the late psychologists Willard and Marguerite Beecher wrote about what they called “the infantile attitude toward marriage” in their book Beyond Success and Failure: Ways to Self-Reliance and Maturity: “We can only guess at the extent of it when we realize the number of love stories that are ground out and consumed each month for books, periodicals, TV, radio, movies, and the like. People would not buy such stuff if they did not believe in its probability. We find no such sale for fairy stories, which are no more fantastic.”

       THE NON-PROBLEM PROBLEM

      These days, in the movies or in real life, there’s not a lot of external conflict to overcome in order for two people to get together. It’s less about class or religion or geography or valid value differences than it is about the inner conflict of not knowing whether this person is The One.

      In other words, nowadays you don’t fall in love with Romeo and say that the relationship

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