"Can't Hardly Wait" 12 Years Later–Or "The Dumb Things I Used to Believe"

Today, I had the misfortune of rewatching one of the biggest movies of my teen years, Can't Hardly Wait, which is the story of a high school boy who has waited from the first day of freshmen year until Graduation to finally tell the hottest girl in school how he feels. She realizes he's what she's always been searching for and his greatest dreams are fulfilled. The movie made my stomach turn in a way that can never turn back.

Back in the day, this sweet, honest story about true love proved that good things happen to good people, even if they are unpopular, dweeby, or unathletic. It gave hope to millions of us boys sitting in the audience, all of us believe we would one day get our chance to make out with the Jennifer Love Hewitt of our schools as long as we yearned and hoped for it enough. Rewatching the film now, God, I couldn't think of something worse for me to watch at fifteen.

It's not hard to pick out lines that are hopelessly untrue but we were desperate to believe. By far, the worst offender here is when the high school jock who learns from the college jock that college girls are "totally different, bro. They're all serious and shit. They all talk about world issues and "ecolomological" crap."  How dumb were we to believe that girls would suddenly become unconcerned with appearance and athleticism? The greatest hypocrisy of the whole movie is that we expect women to snap out of their shallowness while we are choosing who we love entirely on their looks (the guy really didn't know her at all)!

It's equally bad that the jock, who foolishly dumped his gorgeous girlfriend and couldn't get her back, finds himself crushed and calls himself a loser. No matter what, a person's self-worth should not be defined by his or her significant other! It's one thing to be sad, heartbroken even, but to depict that someone is nothing because he lost the girl he wanted is troubling and irrational. But it all feeds into the horribly dangerous theme that…

…a person is justified in obsessing over someone for years even if the object of that affection does not reciprocate at all. The movie tells us it's worth it to twist yourself inside out for as long as it takes because it's just a matter of time until that perfect person you want jumps into your arms. This is deeply misleading, the worst kind of phony wish fulfillment, but none of us were smart enough to catch on at the time. As long as we held out long enough, we believed she would come to us, but I don't have to tell you how this story played out for 999 of 1000 guys who tried it. It's misleading, dishonest, and just leads to even worse feelings of loss down the road. Don't you agree?

So what should've happened? The guy should've realized that his pining was misguided and he should've fallen in love with his redheaded friend who he had a real connection with. That would've been both realistic, tasteful, and helpful. It's fitting that I just saw an excellent production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in which a count sends his beloved servant (a woman disguised as a man) to deliver messages to his love object but ends up falling for the servant when her gender is revealed. He realizes she, the servant, was really the one he had a connection with and admiration for all along.

If only I'd been more interested in Shakespeare than Jennifer Love Hewitt at fifteen…or twenty-seven.