Every hopeless romantic knows the feeling of curling up with a cup of tea to watch two unlikely pairs fall in love with each other. The classics, like You’ve Got Mail, While You Were Sleeping, and Stranger Than Fiction all have one thing in common. None of them have come out within the last 10 years. And, based on the current offerings, we won’t have anything last as a new classic, anytime soon.

The classic rom-coms keep it simple, comfortable, and don’t try to tell a story completely different from what they set out to do. Also, sequels are almost never a good idea, if we’ve learned anything from To All The Boy’s massive drop in quality. 

What makes a Rom-Com so charming and watchable? Why do modern day movies lack these charms? Any girl invested in Lara Jean’s story eagerly anticipated the sequels for To All The Boys, and ended up disappointed with the trilogy. 

Obviously, everyone wants a meet cute romance where boy meets girl in an awkward situation, and they end up falling in love forever, and true romance is only a clumsy trip away from spilling coffee all over your hot boss, but I digress.

When shows start to get too deep, or dependent on sex, it can really skew teenager’s perceptions of what love is supposed to be.  Societal pressures are already on every boy and girl in school, because they want to be the “perfect partner” and show how close they feel to their significant other.

Obviously, everyone wants a meet cute romance where boy meets girl in an awkward situation, and they end up falling in love forever, and true romance is only a clumsy trip away from spilling coffee all over your hot boss, but I digress.

Where To All The Boys stumbled was the sheer unrealistic nature of the issues. Any and all complications could have been solved with a simple conversation, and that’s where things go wrong. A single phrase could have been uttered to stop all conflict, and it would have gone on to be just as charming as the first.

Instead, Lara Jean and Peter go through this topsy turvy whirlwind of an argument that’s about… drumroll please… where they want to go to college. That’s it! The entire movie is about their disconnect in the relationship because they can’t communicate healthily, but in the end they have sex and it makes everything better because they’re closer than ever before. 

That’s not how to solve problems, and it shouldn’t even be implied as such. To show such a vulnerable market of young teenage girls that your boyfriend isn’t communicating because you haven’t had sex is a terrible idea.

Not actually understanding the market is why so many movies aimed at young girls fall short. The Kissing Booth is another one of these movies that simply tries too hard without having any real conflict. 

My advice would be to stick to the classics, and maybe someday, a diamond in the rough will stand out from the others, without being reliant on shock factors and the hypersexualization of teenagers.