The Rom-Commers

by Katherine Center

You had to maximize joy when it fluttered into your life. You had to honor it. And savor it. And not stomp it to death by reminding everyone of everything you’d lost.

“A great rom-com,” I said, “is just like sex. If you’re surprised by the ending, somebody wasn’t doing their job. We all know where it’s headed. The fun is how we get there.

“Real life doesn’t come with warnings,” Logan argued, half-assedly. “That’s why fiction,” I said, “is better than real life.”

But that wasn’t a weakness. That was a strength. I had a theory that we gravitate toward the stories we need in life. Whatever we’re longing for—adventure, excitement, emotion, connection—we turn to stories that help us find it. Whatever questions we’re struggling with—sometimes questions so deep, we don’t even really know we’re asking them—we look for answers in stories.

There was a good writing lesson in there—that being dismissed is worse than being scorned. In a different frame of mind, I might have paused to think about it: Of course not mattering is worse. It means you didn’t even register. It means you’re not even worth getting mad about. It means you’re literally nobody.

Bad ideas are a lot scarier once you realize how bad they are.

Poor happy endings. They’re so aggressively misunderstood. We act like “and they lived happily ever after” is trying to con us into thinking that nothing bad ever happened to anyone ever again. But that’s never the way I read those words. I read them as “and they built a life together, and looked after each other, and made the absolute best of their lives.”

Tragedy is a given. There is no version of human life that doesn’t involve reams of it. The question is what we do in the face of it all.

“Choose a good, imperfect person who leaves the cap off the toothpaste, and puts the toilet paper roll on upside down, and loads the dishwasher like a ferret on steroids—and then appreciate the hell out of that person. Train yourself to see their best, most delightful, most charming qualities. Focus on everything they’re getting right. Be grateful—all the time—and laugh the rest off.”