Why Not Me?

by Mindy Kaling

Here’s what I do like: love stories. Romance. In fact, most of my favorite books employ the “marriage plot.” What is the “marriage plot,” besides the most interesting-sounding movie Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant never made? This is how I’d explain it. You know how all those movie adaptations of Jane Austen books end with Kate Winslet or Keira Knightley standing outside a chapel in the English countryside in a wedding dress with the man of their dreams? That’s the marriage plot. A man and a woman are very attracted to each other but there still seem to be lots of reasons why they can’t be together. Sometimes it’s logistical (he goes off to war), sometimes it’s situational (she’s engaged to someone else), sometimes it’s emotional (he calls her family tacky and she thinks he’s a dickhead). Whatever it is, the audience knows in the back of their heads that these two dum-dums will eventually figure it out and get together and, if we’re lucky, there will be a funny sex scene along the way. But that’s why I usually love the marriage plot. Because you see everything except the wedding.