Why Can't My Life Be Like a Romantic Comedy???

So apparently I’m in this weird “phase” right now where I continually decide on torturing myself by watching ridiculous romantic comedies.  I woke up a little too early for my liking on a Sunday morning and started flipping channels.  I stopped on “The Back Up Plan”.  Seriously???  “The Back Up Plan”?  Oh yeah.  I just sat on my couch for two hours and watched a fairly poorly written Jennifer Lopez movie, wherein her character decides to get artificially inseminated and then meets the man of her dreams on the same day.  Oh and he makes cheese for a living.  I actually even paused it so I could get up and make myself a cup of coffee, that’s how captivated I was.  And here’s the worst part…  (if you’re dying to see this flick and haven’t – Spolier Alert) so at the very end, the cheese maker proposes to her and presents her with a beautiful diamond ring, the test-tube twins in tow in their custom made stroller.  And what did I do upon seeing this adorable display of his dedication to her and the children that weren’t genetically his?  Oh you guessed it!  I bawled like a baby who just had their favorite paci taken away.  And when that passed, I’m pretty sure I cried some more, because I just cried at “The Back Up Plan”.  Now generally, I follow patterns when I’m single.  Right after a break-up, I live it up and go out all the time, enjoying my newfound single-dom.  After that gets old (and expensive) I spend more time at the gym, and at home watching my Sex and the City DVDs.  I start at Season 1 and usually make it through Season 4 before some guy enters my life and perks my interest.  However this bout has taken a new and unexpected path with this whole romantic comedy thing.  I think the weirdest thing about it is that I’m subconsciously wishing my life my would turn into one of these movies.  Now I don’t necessarily want to shop sperm banks and get pregnant in hopes of finding my ideal mate.  But then again, I don’t live in New York City either and all of these movies seem to have something to do with NYC cabs, Central Park, 3 story walkups.  So maybe geography is keeping me from my version of Alex O’Laughlin or Jason Bateman?

So why can’t my life be like a romantic comedy?  I’m sure you’re saying, ‘Well duh.  Because nobody’s life is like a movie.”  But you know what?  I do know people who ended up with that “romantic comedy” plot-in real life!  Let’s take a very close friend of mine, we’ll call her Jane.  Now Jane had never quite had the luckiest of love lives.  She’d get down, and lonely, and depressed, waiting for her Prince Charming to come and sweep her off her feet.  And the comedic part of it all would come from the situations we’d get ourselves into after one too many cocktails.  Bless her heart, but Jane would lose it and cry her eyes out walking drunk down Church St.  It sounds bad, but believe me, had you been there you probably would have found it comedic too.  Although that could have been the point of view of another drunk person… Hmmmm…  Anyways, Jane’s Prince Charming did eventually show up!  Or show back up, I should say.  Jane reconnected with a long lost friend from middle school after 22 years.  Way to GO, Google searches! (This was before the dawn of Facebook)  They met up and saw each other for the first time in all those years here in Orlando one night, and the rest is history!  I witnessed it all first hand…  okay so I maybe not first hand, but I did go over to Jane’s house before she left to meet him so I could hook her up with my 5-minute makeover.  That included - free of charge - hair, makeup, wardrobe advice, and me throwing condoms at her screaming “Just put them in your purse!!!  There’s no harm in having them!  It’s not like you HAVE to use them!  But I’m pretty sure you will!”  I mean c’mon, this was like 22 years of foreplay coming to a head.  I won’t splash all of Jane’s secrets all over the internet, but let’s just say ‘If ya see an SUV a-rockin next to a Chick-Fil-A dumpster down on Sand Lake Rd., don’t come a-knockin’!  After that night it just took a couple of months before he moved 2000 miles away from his home, basically uprooted life as he knew it, all to sweep Jane off her feet.  True story!  I’m telling you, it really happened here.  Not just to a friend of a friend, or this woman that my one friend knew through another woman she had met at work.  I witnessed the whole thing happen before my eyes (well, after the whole Chick-Fil-A part anyway).  They’re getting married now, I’m a bridesmaid, for Christ’s sake!  Everything has worked out beautifully – just like the movies!

So if I’m living a good life, generally being a good person, and contributing positive things to society, where’s my Prince Charming?  Where’s my romantic comedy plot?  I don’t think I’m asking for much.  Just a tall, handsome, successful man.  He can be tall and dark, or tall and blonde, I’m not picky.  Do I need to go run a flower shop, where I can meet him in the hotel lobby where he’s staying on a business trip and I’m the contracted florist who handles the hotel’s floral arrangements?  Or should I start an email relationship with a man who is, unbeknownst to me, actually my nemesis, but he charms me with his words to the point that I end up being able to look past the fact that his company ruined my quaint and unique bookstore, and we live happily ever after?  Or maybe I have to wait until I’ve been a bridesmaid 16 more times, then an adorable man will swoop in and finally make me a bride.  I have an extremely active imagination, that should get me something, right?  Every crush I’ve ever had has been my future husband and father of my children in my fantasies before we’ve ever even gone on a date.  In fact, in most real life scenarios, the date never actually happens!  But I have to think that for all of the fantastic situations I’ve put these men in, fate would have to grant me ONE in the real world, right?  It doesn’t even have to be as fantastic as the movies are.  Shit, at this point, I’d take “Hey, would you like to have coffee sometime?” But of course, it would need to blossom into 3 hours on the patio of Starbucks while we gaze longingly into each other’s eyes, sipping our macchiatos and discussing our deepest fears and desires, all contributing to the mutual conclusion that we were meant to be together.  Now that can’t be all that hard to bring to reality, can it?  Oh, and he also needs to be that guy that I saw and immediately felt butterflies in my stomach over.  Not the ‘Eh, he’s okay.  I’ll give it a shot so I at least feel like I’m putting myself out there’ guy.  That wouldn’t make a very good movie.

I suppose until “he” knocks on my door with a bouquet of flowers, after I’ve been crying over being lonely, while Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream plays in the background, I’ll just have to be content with the life I have now.  We’ll see how long this little phase lasts.  I’m well on my way to building up a serious list of such fantastic films as “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”, “Failure to Launch”, “Sweet Home Alabama”, and “Life as We Know It” (Don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of it either.  Katherine Heigl and Fergie’s husband Josh something or other are forced to become mutual guardians of their friends’ baby.  Must not have done very well at the box office).  But don’t think for a minute that I’ll stop planning my dream wedding with the most recent man of interest.  The way I imagine it, he’s going to fall for me any day now and plan a creative, extravagant way to show me.  It’ll probably involve a scavenger hunt, or a jumbotron at a major sporting event…  At least I’m getting a ton of bridal gown ideas watching all these movies!  The one George Clooney’s sister had in “Up in the Air” was pretty lame, definitely not going to go with a shrug of any kind.