The term “swan song” might seem a bit hyperbolic, because Hollywood will be dark and shuttered by the time it has completely finished with heterosexual romance. Still, the fact remains that Harry and Sally stepped into the twilight years of widely-sanctioned heteronormativity. By the time “Clueless” was made in 1995, it was necessary to offset the hyper-stereotyped gendered characters with an equally-stereotyped (but also attractive and lovable) gay friend. Moving on through nineties hits like “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and “As Good As It Gets,” the gay friend was just one of many devices directors used to signal that they weren’t wedded to the trite, cookie-cutter stereotype of Boy Meets Girl.

And so the rom com went into decline. It was fairly inevitable once romantic love devolved from Boy Meets Girl into Two Or More People Doing Something Unspecified, Which However Is Deeply Meaningful To Them. Heaven help the scriptwriter who tries to pull a heartwarming love story from today’s morass of politically correct romantic ideals.

The reason we love romantic comedies is because they present us with a new variation on a timeless script that we all understand to be foundational to human life and society. When a comic story is implicitly underwritten by our recognition of the real significance of romantic love, even the most noxious and grimace-inducing sentimentality can take on certain shades of deeper meaning. That is possible because we know that falling in love really is something that characteristically happens to the young and foolish (so, people who may actually be charmed by candy hearts and lacy teddy bears), but that turns out to be far more significant than they themselves appreciate. Young lovers may be idiots, but they aren’t entirely wrong to assert that there is something eternal at the core of the gooey feelings. It is the seed from which future generations may spring. And in that sense, the Boy Meets Girl story really is the story of us all.