This essay is part of Avidly’s RomCom Superlatives series
In the early months of the pandemic, everyone craved comfort. Some found it in sourdough. We found it in rom-coms.
We are a group of assorted millennials and Gen-X-ers who first converged during that fateful week in mid-March 2020 when the world shut down. Some of us work together; some of us are decades-old friends; some of us have never met. In the midst of the apocalypse, Care and Bri were texting and decided that what the two of us most needed was a virtual group-watch of the forgettable 2018 rom-com Destination Wedding. We invited everyone we knew on Facebook, and a bunch of folks came.
Destination Wedding has a51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where critics revile its “utterly repugnant characters” and “sewer-bile dialogue.” Turns out it hit the spot. Keanu and Winona hooked up in the desert under the watchful eye of a mountain lion, we all kept up a steady stream of snark and emojis, and for 87 minutes all was well with the world.
Many experiences from that era have been lost in the past — trying not to touch our faces; Zooming for fun — but for us the rom-coms have remained. This December we’re celebrating three years and nine months of almost-weekly movie nights, with 70 viewers coming and going over the years and a critical mass of seven or so folks participating most weeks.
Together we’ve watched classics like Roman Holiday and When Harry Met Sally and While You Were Sleeping, movies some of us have seen dozens of times but never get old, and are even more pleasurable when re-watched in good company. We’ve seen recent must-watches like Miss Granny and The Forty-Year-Old Version and Fire Island, movies that are revelations, movies we can see ourselves in. We’ve also snarked and cackled through our share of real stinkers and some truly bonkers films, like the mind-blowingly bananas A New York Christmas Wedding, which still cracks us up. (If you’ve ever felt like rom-coms needed more gay fetus angels, this one’s for you!)
Why watch hundreds of rom-coms together? What keeps us coming back? And how have all these movies changed us?
It was Jen who first realized that our group itself is a lot like a rom-com. Socially Distant Movie Night kind of sounds like a title, and our story hits all the classic rom-com beats.
What follows is an oral history of our movie night in the shape of a romcom, spliced together from our memories.
Backstories
Like rom-com characters, we each showed up to the genre with our own baggage. We were wary, or grieving, or in love with the idea of love.
Amanda Watson: Even though I was desperate for any kind of socializing to break up the terror and monotony of the early pandemic months, I resisted the idea of watching rom-coms, in no small part because I so rarely see myself in them. I’m middle-aged, queer, and perpetually single; I always thought that they don’t make romantic comedies about people like me, so why watch them? My idea of rom-coms was formed by the big 90s hits of the genre, which were extremely white, cisgender, and heterosexual. With a few exceptions — like Moonstruck, which we watched on our third Socially Distant Movie Night anniversary — none of my favorite movies fall into the rom-com category.
Sarah Woodford: When I was in high school, Mom and I watched a rom-com every Friday night. Many of the 1990s to early 2000s standards graced our screen with their 90-minute narratives: The Wedding Planner, When Harry Met Sally, Bridget Jones’ Diary, to name a few. But the one we would watch again and again was Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Anne was the ordinary and extraordinary character to cheer for. She gave us hope that a beautiful love story could happen to anyone.
Mom died ten years ago, and the unexpected gift of Socially Distant Movie Night is finding a time each week to remember her through a much-loved ritual from my high school days. I also get to continue witnessing with a wonderful community the ordinary extraordinariness of a love story.
Leah Abuan Milne: Technology has always shaped my rom-com watching. I don’t just mean the purity of 1998 when I first watched You’ve Got Mail, blissfully unaware of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. I mean that I watched so many rom-coms because they were just on in the background. I didn’t have to consciously search and stream them; I just flipped through channels until Clueless or Jerry Maguire popped up. This is how I discovered But I’m a Cheerleader, how I fell in love with the soundtrack to My Best Friend’s Wedding, and how I ended up watching While You Were Sleeping at least a dozen times.
Streaming offered a different form of serendipity. At one of the worst points in my life, I came upon Sleepless in Seattle, which I hadn’t seen since its debut a decade earlier. I sat on the couch and watched the entire movie. When it was over, I restarted it and watched it a second time. Maybe a third or a fourth.
In what I consider one of our many personal precursors to SDMN, several years later, I texted friends throughout my entire theater viewing of Crazy Rich Asians, anxious that it would be bad or even mediocre, and that, like the TV show All-American Girl, its relative mediocrity would mean 20 years before another Asian American-led rom-com would emerge. It was only after a second viewing that I could relax and enjoy it.
Meet Cutes
Connecting via catastrophe is a classic rom-com trope: the slapstick disaster of spilling coffee down the front of your boss’s outfit, or the true tragedy of watching your crush fall into a coma. Our catastrophe was cosmic, and our connection is enduring.
Jennifer Ho: Perhaps the entire concept of how we came together to watch rom-coms is one “meet cute” – brought together due to circumstances beyond our control from four different time zones.
The first movie we watched set the tone for our weekly movie nights. Destination Wedding was a film that we would likely have resented paying money to watch in a movie theater. But watching the film in our living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, or offices amidst the uncertainty of the unfolding global pandemic and riffing off the film with a group of friends—some of us had known one another for years, others were names and thumbnail photos that developed into friendships over weeks, then months, and years-–was both cozy and entertaining, the way that watching a good rom-com will make you feel.
The magic of watching Destination Wedding was not in how much we enjoyed the plot, acting, or setting, but in how we could register our reactions online together as it was playing out, feeling camaraderie with our socially distant friends via comments and emojis to illustrate our unanimous feelings that this was a bad rom-com, while also enjoying the ridiculousness of its badness—like the improbable mountain lion scene that results in Ryder and Reeves finally kissing. And maybe that’s an apt metaphor for how we would find ourselves coming together—through the improbable pandemic, the specter of danger and death, and the laughter that wards off that fear and anxiety.
Amy Wan: I didn’t make it to the first SDMN but somehow made it for the second week, which was also my oldest son’s 11th birthday. At that point, we had already been locked in our apartment for a week, looking out on empty and quiet streets in Jackson Heights, NY, two blocks away from Elmhurst Hospital, the “epicenter of the epicenter” where they had already parked a refrigerator truck for the bodies. In the weeks that followed, SDMN was a tether to normalcy, movies where the characters roamed freely, hugged and kissed (and sometimes had sex with) strangers, not a mask in sight. It was like a weekly visit to the past and a wish that life would look that way again at some point in the future.
Sarah Woodford: I live alone, and joined SDMN during the height of the pandemic when I was stuck at home and isolated from in-person community. Briallen would post hilarious reviews of rom-coms on Facebook and invite folks to watch them with her and Caroline. I didn’t think the invitation was for me—until I had the courage to private message and ask. Since Mom died, I had drifted away from watching rom-coms. I wondered if joining this group would be a new—yet familiar—way to help break up hours of loneliness and fear.
Leah Abuan Milne: I’d pretty much left social media thanks to the 2016 elections, so I was late to Socially Distant Movie Night. However, just like most of the rom-coms in my life, it was only possible with digital technology (thank you, Slack) and came along right when I needed it. The pandemic and the accompanying resurgence of anti-Asian racism made me feel like a paranoid shut-in, but Socially Distant Movie Night makes me feel more like myself.
Amanda Watson: Like Leah, I was late arriving to Socially Distant Movie Night. … But in the winter of 2020 I had a lot of thoughts about Happiest Season, Hulu’s lesbian Christmas comedy starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. So when Briallen announced it as the selection for the beginning of December, I joined the group watch, and the rest was history.
Best Friends
A best friend in a romcom is a cheerleader, a truth-teller, a reality check, a rock. Sometimes best friends remain in supporting roles, but occasionally, like Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding, they turn out to be the main event: embodiments of wisdom and solace and epigrams and joy.
Jennifer Ho: Perhaps we are collectively the best gal pal in the rom-com. We’re Judy Greer in 27 Dresses with our wisecracks and sarcasm, or Michelle Buteau in Always Be My Maybe, dropping truth and metaphorically being willing to hold our friend’s water bottles in our thigh cracks as needed. We’re Joan Cusack in Runaway Bride, steadfast no matter what—because the point is not that all the films we watched were spectacular hits and rated fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but that we are devoted and loyal, like the gal pal always is, to the rom-com protagonist–-which in our case is the genre of the rom-com.
Or perhaps the more apt analogy is the unexpected discovery of family in While You Were Sleeping— that Sandra Bullock’s heroine falls in love with the entire Callaghan clan because of how they make her feel—included and beloved for being just who she is. Finding connections with people who see and understand you when you least expect it in moments of sadness is the real payoff of any rom-com.
Leah Abuan Milne: I knew some members of the group before joining SDMN, but made other friends along the way. While watching, we give updates on who is sitting next to us, quote movie lines to each other, and respond with boisterous emoji usage. Thanks to SDMN, I know that Jennifer Coolidge is a guaranteed joy in any rom-com, that Fire Island is by far the best Jane Austen adaptation, and that even the worst movies are fun in the right company. My work schedule and other obstacles make weekly watching challenging, but even then, it’s a comfort to know that my friends are there, watching and chatting in the background. In this case, the technology is forgiving and affirmative. Once we sync our screens and hit play, it is all about being in the same digital space.
Sarah Woodford: In the best rom-coms, the main characters move from meet-cute and shallow attraction to a place of vulnerability and trust. Learning to be vulnerable, learning to be ourselves with others—it’s a hero’s (or heroine’s) journey that we all experience. And it’s been a journey that we’ve experienced as a community. SDMN is a group of folks who come from different time zones and different backgrounds. I’ve learned so much about how those 90s to early 2000s standards that Mom and I watched without much thought as cisgender white women, hurt and ignored the experiences of BIPOC and queer folks. I’m glad that through watching a rom-com with the SDMN gang, we can giggle over a cute scene and I can also help hold space when someone says, “Ouch! That’s not okay.” I love getting to watch rom-coms from BIPOC and queer perspectives, because as Anne taught me and Mom years ago, a beautiful love story must happen to everyone (if that’s what they want). And every week at SDMN, we get to witness the ordinary extraordinariness of it all—and deepen our friendships in the process. I think Mom would approve.
Amanda Watson: My sense of what the genre can encompass has grown wider with every movie night. A Korean grandmother re-navigating the world after getting magically turned into a 20-year-old? A Black trans teenage girl just trying to live her life and become a marine biologist and maybe find a boyfriend? The true story of London queer activists supporting striking Welsh coal miners in the 1980s? Yes, yes, and yes (shoutouts to Miss Granny, Anything’s Possible, and Pride): we’ve watched all those alongside the more familiar fare like Notting Hill or Four Weddings and a Funeral. (Both of which hold up surprisingly well, it turns out!)
Watching rom-coms with the Socially Distant Movie Night crew has been an education both in how diverse the genre can be — and in how to enjoy something despite its flaws. We find our validation in each other, even when it’s not there on the screen in front of us.
Amy Wan: As white and heteronormative as most rom-coms are, our weekly selections included movies that reflected those of us watching, centered around BIPOC, immigrant, or queer (sometimes all three!) romantic leads as often as ones that starred Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock. And when we do watch our many mainstream rom-coms, we cringe together whenever the plots or jokes rely on tired and offensive stereotypes. This community was a respite during the protests and uprisings during the summer of 2020 and when, during our first anniversary celebration in March 2021, news filtered out about the mass shootings in Atlanta. And this community is still here, as we make our way back to some kind of normalcy with covid still looming and where we can take a break from the culture of overwork that somehow doesn’t reflect the fact that the world has changed.
Caroline Kyungah Hong: In its early days, SDMN enabled us to collectively pursue what adrienne maree brown called “the pleasures of quarantine,” even as we grappled with the end of the world as we’d known it. (Or perhaps, as we were forced to confront the world as it had always been.) Together we have grieved, we have raged, we have tenderly cared for and comforted each other from afar, all through the pandemic, the mass protests against police brutality and anti-Black racism and violence, the rise of anti-Asian racism and violence, the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, endless mass shootings…. Week after week, we have laughed and wept together, not so much to escape our world as to fortify ourselves to fully live in it, to continue to fight the good fight. Our movie night fam was then (and still is now) a lifeline.
Grand Romantic Gesture
Like Meg Ryan and Rosie O’Donnell in Sleepless in Seattle, some of us discovered that watching romantic movies with friends can lead to some wildly romantic behavior in real life.
Briallen Hopper: In June 2020, three months after Socially Distant Movie Night began, I rented a car the very first weekend the local Enterprise reopened and drove three thousand miles alone to meet the internet stranger I’d been talking to online and over the phone every day of the pandemic. Forget about racing to the airport: flying didn’t feel safe, so I drove through midnight desert storms and over snowy mountains instead. Sleepless in Seattle meets Contagion!
We were opposites attracting. I was a 40-something spinster who had literally written a book about being single; they were a 20-something former bodybuilder/frat bro who liked to post silly memes and sexy selfies. Though we had been connected on social media for years, our paths had never crossed IRL. Then the week that the world closed down, the same week Socially Distant Movie Night began, they slid into my DMs, and the general apocalypse vibe made me more open to unexpected connections than I otherwise would have been. We started talking on the phone for hours every day—a lifeline for us both.
We met for the first time in an Enterprise parking lot in Southern California. I was wearing my favorite red sundress; they were wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and blasting Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” from their car stereo. We kissed and it felt good right away. Three and a half years later, we’re still together, and it’s still good.
I’m not saying that my steady diet of rom-coms was solely responsible for this scenario, but it certainly didn’t hurt. When it came time for a Grand Romantic Gesture, I knew how to rise to the occasion. Nora Ephron taught me well.
Happily Ever After
So many virtual book clubs and cocktail hours have served their purpose and died away. Yet here we still are, a love story stretching implausibly into the future, like the Mamma Mia! universe. As of this writing, it looks like we’ll be here for a while.
Jennifer Ho: Perhaps we are like the ending of The Half of It, Alice Wu’s queer reimagining of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the film’s last scene, teenager Ellie Chu is on a train headed to Grinnell College and as the train pulls away she sees her friend Paul running alongside her window. He does this not because he is in love with her (though he had expressed romantic feelings for her, briefly channeling them away from their mutual crush, Astor, to Ellie before he realizes that she is also in love with Astor).
Paul runs alongside Ellie’s train in homage to a scene from a film they watched earlier that Ellie mocked—the hero running alongside the train carrying away the woman he loves. Paul thinks it is romantic. Ellie believes it’s stupid. So when Ellie finds Paul running and waving as her train gains speed, she laughs and then cries at saying goodbye to a friendship that she didn’t expect would be so meaningful to her. Which is how the ending of Socially Distant Movie Night will feel when it finally ends—a relationship we weren’t looking for but that has carried us through laughter and tears to friendships we truly treasure.
Amanda Watson: In the back of my mind, I always used to believe that I was destined to be alone forever. At some point — before Socially Distant Movie Night got started, but not very long before it — it occurred to me that this narrative, like the plot of any rom-com, was just a story someone (me, in this case) had made up. What if, instead, I’m the kind of person who pratfalls into finding true love in middle age? Wilder stories have definitely been told, as I’m all too aware after our group watch of the entire Twilight saga. Our movie nights have been an ongoing reminder that wanting a classic meet-cute of my very own doesn’t mean subscribing wholesale to an overwhelmingly white, cisheteronormative, amatonormative view of the world (which I think was my assumption going in). The world of rom-coms is bigger and weirder and funnier than that, and maybe there’s room in it for all of our stories in the end.
End Credits
Jennifer Ho teaches Asian American studies and critical race theory at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also directs the Center for Humanities & the Arts. She does believe that if you look for it, love is actually all around, especially with the SDMN.
Briallen Hopper teaches creative nonfiction at Queens College, CUNY. She has watched a lot of made-for-streaming Hulu/Netflix nonsense, but her favorite rom-coms star Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, or Barbara Stanwyck.
Caroline Kyungah Hong is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Queens College AANAPISI Project at Queens College, CUNY. Her field is Asian American studies, and her primary methods are fangirling, shipping, and jokes.
Leah Abuan Milne is Associate Professor of English at the University of Indianapolis, author of Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives, and also just a girl, standing in front of a pizza, asking it to love her.
Amy Wan teaches and writes about literacy, language policy, multilingualism, and public education as a Professor of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She has neither a head for business nor a bod for sin.
Amanda Watson is the Librarian for English and Comparative Literature at New York University. Like Nicolas Cage’s character in Moonstruck, she’s often to be found at the opera.
Sarah Woodford is a writer based in Connecticut. She is v. v. fond of a well-knitted Christmas jumper … especially if worn by Colin Firth.