I Spent a Year Watching Rom-Coms and This Is the Crap I Learned

"On the morning of January 3rd, I had started my doctoral research, a feminist analysis of romantic comedies, skipping off to the New York Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center brimming with excitement and pride. And barely six weeks later, on the night of February 13th, the man I was madly in love with, a great guy with –- it must be said –- a less than perfect sense of timing, broke up with me.

I was a wreck. More than that, I was a wreck whose job it was to watch a minimum of half a dozen rom coms a week. I spent my days at the library, reading about the genre and taking regular weeping breaks that attracted pitying glances from the circulation desk clerks. I spent my nights in bed with my laptop, watching as Kate and Katherine and Meg and Julia and Drew all found true love, taking notes and nursing my very broken heart.

My life had very quickly started to resemble the very genre I was studying. A feminist rom com scholar is dumped by her wonderful boyfriend on the night before Valentine's Day and has to spend the next year (or three) studying movies in which love always –- always -– conquers all? My sister was right: it was a perfect set up for a romantic comedy."

Hah. When I got dumped in school, it was the first day of a quarter where I was signed up to take a love poetry class. But this is worse.