"Again?!"
I look up from my sketch pad and eye my husband who just let out that incredulous question. He's sitting down at his usual spot in front of his gaming PC (ahem, again), his headphones rest around his neck, face screwed up in annoyance. It's not totally unwarranted. I'd estimate that this is approximately the 736th time I've popped on Clueless as background fodder.
"Mind your business," I playfully retort, smiling as Cher Horowitz uses her fashion software to select the perfect matching outfit for the day,
Teen rom-coms are my absolute weakness.
Ever since I was a pre-teen girl, I've been obsessed with these movies and if I am being honest, they have persisted into my adulthood. Throughout all my angsty phases, no matter what, movies like Never Been Kissed or anything from John Hughes' catalog served as a source of comfort to me. As a girl who was frequently bullied for her love of books and her doughy build, I think deep down, those movies always represented hope to me.
Though I do wish that I had not taken everything those movies preached to heart.
The idea that the nerdy girl or guy always won at the end of the day, that being yourself actually paid off, all of it validated for me that my fate wasn't sealed.
When it came to matters of the heart, I was woefully inept. I had crushes like crazy, but none of it amounted to anything. I always assumed my teen queen moment would come. Maybe I'd get to start over as the mysterious new girl at a school that everyone would fawn over. Maybe I'd lose all the "baby fat" and emerge this stereotypically beautiful swan, worthy of the prom king and the happy ending.
That, obviously, never happened. But what I wish I knew as a teen was that in all actuality, I really didn't want that to happen.
Life, I've learned, is far more beautiful and vast than any of those "happy endings." Being an adult and rewatching those films is kind of like an out-of-body experience. I wish I could go back in time and tell my overweight, underconfident self that these movies aren't the forever dream. Sure, it'd have been nice to go on a date and not catch the laughter of people making fun of me when wearing a bathing suit. But it pales in comparison as to what real life gave me. It certainly was a lot more than a questionable prince from my time as a high school pariah.
Those movies never did a great job of showing how fulfilling life could be when you weren't tied down to the dramatics of dating and popularity,
In high school, I had very few close friends. And guess what? My kid currently all calls each of them and their partners "aunt and uncle" nearly 20 years later. I honestly doubt that Claire from The Breakfast Club could say the same. Because I wasn't super focused on dating trouble (though admittedly the lack of dating in high school was a source of stress at the time), I was free to kind of just discover my weird and wonderful self with my favorite other weirdos.
The teen rom-com scene was also full of painful, fatphobic, misogynistic, and even sometimes racist rhetoric. Though I'm able to watch them today with a more critical eye, I think I 100% internalized a lot of the negative messaging in these movies. It's something I hope girls are spared as these movies grow ever slightly more evolved.
I wish I could give my angsty young self a heads up that everyone was right: It does get better.
I'd want to tell her that she did end up getting the guy and that he'd be making playful fun of her in the basement of the home she'd buy herself with her own money. I wish I could tell her she started a career and a family all without the help of the coolest guy in school or a slow-motion makeover scene. The truth is those movies pale in comparison to some of the joys (and even hardships) of what she'd come to face.
In the interest of full transparency, I will continue to binge watch my favorite teen stories until I am an old biddy and they're on in the nursing home lobby. But to the young girls who are doe-eyed and pining for the boy next door, I hope you learn sooner than I did that the life that awaits you outside of your small world is more thrilling than Freddie Prinze Jr's eyelashes. And that you need to change nothing that you love about yourself to get someone's attention.
After all, do you really want to hinge your dreams on anyone else's opinion on you?
As if!
