Doris Day Wants You!...To Get Married

Thursday, after a rough day, I settled down with the completely forgettable It Had to Be You starring one Michael Vartan and Natasha Henstridge, whose "break-through" role involved Matthew Perry (The Whole Nine Yards). The premise is that these two people meet while they are registering for their respective weddings and fall in love with each other (thereby jilting both their fiances).

We don't see Anna's (Henstridge) fiance, David. But, for some reason, there's an awful lot of Claire, Charlie's (Vartan) fiance. She can't go wedding shopping with him because she has to fly to London for her editing job. She meets up with him at the Plaza for a night, but then immediately goes back to work in the morning. Here's Charlie, waxing nostalgic about the early days of their relationship, those times when she worked at Macy's writing ad copy and they ate pizza from Ray's. He says he misses those days. She turns around and tells him she doesn't. She doesn't miss scraping by on $25,000 a year at a job she hated. She leaves. In the context of this movie, this is shorthand that indicates that she and Charlie are wrong for each other. There are no actual relationship problems (other than his wandering eye), just her ambition. We don't see the break-up, but Charlie goes on to write a book about his love for Anna (the schoolteacher, by the way--not only traditionally a woman's job, but also one that indicates a lack of ambition and the desire for children).

Recently, Sam lent me a book called Bachelor Girl by Betty Israel. It's the first history book I've ever read like a novel. It follows the plight of the single girl, mainly in New York City, from the 1860s to roughly the present. It's fascinating, but not without its flaws. Both Sam and I agreed that the chapters attempting to address the present day are sadly lacking. It's the problem of all history books, I think. Without the proper distance, the historian's penchant for generalities comes off as naive and narrow if not completely off-base. This is especially true for the social historian, I think. Who can tell if what consumes you or even the person down the street at this moment will be something that translates to the cultural landscape? A historian's methods are not those of a sociologist and I guess that's what I take issue with in Israel's last chapters.

Regardless, Bachelor Girl has made me acutely aware of my own single girl lifestyle as well as my barely conscious thoughts about relationships and marriage. While Israel seems to attribute cultural mouthpiece status to magazines and newspapers (not surprising given her methods as a historian and the convenience of quoting them), I find that my own thoughts are much more likely to be influenced by movies (not surprising to anyone who's met me).

I have seen, in my lifetime, hundreds upon hundreds of romantic comedies. These are the images of single life that shape my perceptions of the way in which I should live (or want to live). These are the women I could be. Will I be like Janeane Garofalo in The Truth About Cats and Dogs--single and scared of involvement, playing violin to my cat (assuming I learned violin and got a cat)? Will I ramble on about the 3 seconds in my 33rd year which would have been the perfect time to get married, if I hadn't slept through them, like Jeanne Tripplehorn in 'Till There Was You? Who wouldn't want to be Jessica Stein in Kissing Jessica Stein, with her copyediting job and apartment with its own spiral staircase? And there's always the danger that I could turn out like Sandra Bullock, pre-makeover, in Love Potion #9, the awkward conversationalist at dinner with friends, being taken advantage of by a jackass not-boyfriend and unable to flirt my way out of a moving violation ticket for my crap car. Of course, these are pretty recent examples. I used to spend Sunday afternoons watching Doris Day movies on the Family Channel. Now there's the glamourous single woman you want to be--minus the helmet hair.

All these movies have in common the expectation of marriage. It may only be implied, but it is there in the construction of the love-of-my-life romance. If a romantic comedy ends before the marriage scene, it's because it doesn't need it. Every little girl knows what follows the final clinch.

So, this leaves singlehood as the interlude. The glamourous in-between time may be prolonged, but is not to be considered permanent. This is key. Romantic comedies are littered with the shells of women who might have gotten married except they entrenched themselves too much in singlehood. I watched one Thursday night. It is a genre that so often makes women choose between love and careers.

In That Touch of Mink, Cary Grant comes right out and says that Doris Day is such a disaster at the office that the only option for her future is for some nice fellow, not too bright, to marry her and take her away to some house in the country. Israel uses as an example Kate and Leopold, a movie in which Meg Ryan not only gives up her job for Hugh Jackman, but also her right to wear pants and smoke in public by going back in time with him to 1870. And this movie was made in 2001. I could go on for days. The point is, I've left school and entered into this strange new stage of my life. I don't know how long it will last. My role models are problematic when they aren't laughably detached from reality.

If I can't be Doris Day, who will I be?