Is the Romance Dead?

Anyone who knows me knows I love romantic comedies. They are my favorite types of movies and I own all of them.

I just finished watching While You Were Sleeping and It suddenly occurred to me that romantic comedies have taken a strange turn in recent years. In the 90s most the the main characters were pretty middle class. In While you were Sleeping Sandra Bullock's character worked in a ticket booth and her love interested worked for a small family business. In Sleepless in Seattle Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were a journalist and a architect...pretty decent jobs but by no means jobs that would have them living on 5th Avenue.

If you watch recent romantic comedies all the women are high flighers. They are award winning journalist or producers, they wear designer clothes and get their nails done every week. The love interests for them are government officials, socialites, lawyers, bankers. It seems romance doesn't exist outside of New York and apparently lower and middle class people don't fall in love any more.

I suppose this sounds a little ridiculous, but as a perfectly average woman from the middle class (soon to be lower class if unemployment stays the way it is) I like watching characters that I can relate to. I like watching Sandra Bullock when her hair is a mess and she's wearing clothes three sizes too big for her. I like that in WYWS Lucy's love story with Jack is small...he doesn't buy her a penthouse or designer clothes, he takes her to Florence for their honeymoon. I'm sure if the story continued they'd have a perfectly average life.

I think it says a lot about our current society that the most important things about these new romantic characters is that they manage to marry rich or get the most expensive clothes and jewelry or the house in the Hamptons. 99% of the country and viewing public doesn't get anywhere near that kind of life and I think if you look at the longest running, still-on-TV-at-the-weekends-till-this-day-type of movies, they are the ones from the 80s and 90s when the average person could relate to the characters.

I for one would love to see a new romanitc comedy that takes it's Que from Meg and Sandra's era. I think that would be something worth watching and would definitely get added to my collection.