The wife and her bud settle in to watch a rom-com he likes that she hasn’t seen. He has one favorite he’s seen fifty times, several others on a second tier below that favorite. It’s a sweet thing, the rom-com thing; he loves them, watches them for comfort. The wife watches The Walking Dead for comfort. She likes a great rom-com too, but romance is not her idea of comfort right now. They’re sweet and hopeful and sometimes corny AF and sometimes perpetuate extremely unrealistic ideas about love. She wants to be sweet and hopeful and she knows she’s sometimes corny but right now her ideas about love are messed up to say the least. This particular rom-com is about a couple trying to figure out by fate if they’re meant to be together by fate. That sentence has actually been edited. You read it correctly. It’s set in New York City, as they often are. There’s Wollman Rink, where she fell on the ice when she was in sixth grade, there’s Serendipity, where she had her first date ever, there are all her favorite bookstores that don’t exist anymore. It’s a sweet enough movie, and at the end when the couple comes together, clearly by fate, a Nick Drake song plays that her dear punk friends sang at their wedding. Her bud is holding her hand. She chokes out an explanation of why she’s crying, he squeezes her hand harder. She hasn’t cried for a couple days, since the kids came around singing. She doesn’t want her bud to feel like his rom-com comfort plan failed. She doesn’t want to wonder if it means anything that this song was in this movie about romantic fate, or that she’s sitting there listening to it holding hands with someone who isn’t her husband.