Romantic comedies aren’t exactly known for being the movies that are the most realistic. The way people fall in love so easily and how everything ends up alright in the end, it’s almost fantasy or science fiction. I feel like Star Wars has more things in it that make sense than romantic comedies do.
One of the things that rarely makes sense in romantic comedies is how everyone seems to be successful. If you’re not a doctor, you’ve somehow failed at life – and that’s also probably why you’re not finding true love. With the success often come a list of jobs that almost literally no one does in the real world. Either it’s an exclusive job that only a handful of people do, or it’s not an actual job but the movie decided to turn it into one. Let’s take a look at some of the worst offenders below.
Architect
Tell me, how many architects do you know? You usually meet your first
one when you’re building a house, and you never meet one
afterwards. Unless you’re getting a second opinion on your house.
It’s a niche line of work that has a lot of unemployment in it.
Considering how a single architect can easily deal with multiple
projects and not everyone has the luxury of being able to build their
own house, it only makes sense that there’d only be a handful of
them. And there’s a lot of romantic comedies out there that star
successful architects: The Lake House, Three to Tango, The Last
Kiss, Sleepless in Seattle, Love Actually, Just Like Heaven, (500)
Days of Summer, … Those movies alone probably have more
successful architects in them than most small countries!
Musician
Again, successful musicians really aren’t all that common – and
they usually have very little difficulty finding someone to start a
relationship with. But enter the romcom to somehow make you feel sad
for that one successful musician that somehow really can’t find
true love. It’s often used as a trick to make a character appear
more sensitive than the writing staff’s ability allows them to be,
and the list of movies that use this specific job is almost endless:
Music and Lyrics, Love Actually, The Wedding Singer, New Year’s
Eve, … And let’s not forget about pretty much every musical,
where somehow every main character is a singer or wants to be one.
And they fall in love with someone else that’s either a singer or
wants to be one. Everyone’s a top grade musician in musicals,
basically.
Bookstore Owner
I mean, how many book stores are there left? They’re becoming more
and more scarce since the business plan is obviously no longer
sustainable in our modern age of e-commerce, but somehow romantic
comedies like You’ve Got Mail, Notting Hill or Funny Face
would have us believe that not only do bookstore owners still exist,
some of them are actually successful! The characters that own a book
store are usually perceived as quirky and intelligent.
Curator
Even in a big city it’s hard to run into a curator. Yet somehow
shows like Sex and the City would have us believe that it’s
a popular line of work. There’s also movies like Made of Honor,
When in Rome and Love Actually (everyone’s successful in
that movie, really) on the list of offenders. I didn’t even know
curators were a thing before I saw a romantic comedy. Apparently it’s
most often used to give someone an intelligent and artistic
personality. I’d be more inclined to call it lucky, considering how
low your odds are of actually getting a job in that line of work.
Television Producer
Despite women being grossly underrepresented in the world of media
and its high-level jobs, rom coms would have you believe that most
television producers are in fact, women. You have Morning Glory,
Knocked Up, The Switch and loads of other movies where the main
female character is a television producer or at least someone who has
a very important job in the world of television. It helps making them
look career-driven, and more often than not that’ll be the biggest
plot reason of why they can’t keep a relationship. Because women
can’t have careers and be happy, you know.
Magazine Editor
If you frequently read magazines, it’s hard to imagine that these things get edited in the first place. In the surrealistic world of the romantic comedy however, magazine editors seem to be everywhere. And they’re busy people, too! They actually work hard to edit the living bajeezus out of those magazines. There’s magazine editors in Friends With Benefits, 13 Going on 30, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Brown Sugar. The one thing about this job is that it appears to be – at least according to romantic comedies – equally divided between men and women.
