Re-Thinking the Rom Com: What Nancy Meyers Knows About Love After 50—and Why We’re Here for Her Idea of Romance Later in Life

Last week, The Sunday Paper team had a text chain going about our favorite rom coms—movies about love that we go back to again and again. At the top of our list? Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, two films directed by Nancy Meyers that center around dating and finding love later in life. So, when The Atlantic ran a piece this week praising Meyers for these progressive, nuanced flics, we were there for it.

“Romantic comedies are not mere guilty pleasures,” wrote the article’s author, Kelly Coyne. “They can be scripts that guide our love lives—and how we navigate those norms helps determine how we spend our time on Earth. Though Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated are about older people, they provide women in their 20s and—as in my case—30s with alternative ways of thinking about what we want from our relationships and our futures.”

Thank you, Nancy Meyers, for showing all of us that love doesn’t always look the way we imagine it should—and for giving us, as Coyne so eloquently put it, “an opportunity to rethink the rote role of romantic love in our culture.”