Of all the romcom tropes, “the amicable breakup” might be the most misunderstood, yet cathartic.
When you break down the tropes of the romantic comedy, a handful immediately come to mind: friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, the sassy best friend, the makeover sequence. But one of the least discussed (and most misunderstood) rom-com tropes is “the amicable breakup.” Normally, there comes a moment when the film needs its heroine to leave her current partner to run off with Prince Charming. If the partner is a jerk (a la Glenn in The Wedding Singer), there’s no issue—the only thing to do when a leading lady dumps a jerk is to applaud. But if he’s not a jerk, the amicable breakup can be easily written off as a measure of expediency. He’s there to provide an obstacle to the romance, and the breakup needs to happen to make room for the romantic fantasy. But this view of the trope misses that the amicable breakup is an intrinsic part of the romantic fantasy itself. To see it plainly, look no further than the films of the romantic comedy’s grande dame, Nora Ephron.
In Sleepless in Seattle, we have one of the clearest and most memorable amicable breakups of all time, but also one that is often severely misinterpreted. Annie (Meg Ryan) is head over heels for Sam (Tom Hanks), or perhaps more accurately, his voice on the radio when she hears him on a late-night call-in show. She’s on a mission to meet him, obsessed less with the man himself than with the idea of what could be. So when she realizes that she must end things with sweet, slightly dopey fiancé Walter (Bill Pullman), the audience is prepared for heartbreak only to discover that Walter… gets it. Looking out at the Empire State Building, where Annie has asked Sam to meet her, Walter says gently, “So he could be up there right now,” expressing a level of optimism even Annie can’t bring herself to utter aloud.
This moment, and the entire idea that Annie would even leave Walter, often lodges itself in viewers’ eyes as absurdist. When Seattle Times writers Moira Macdonald and Jackie Varriano rewatched the film for its 30th anniversary, they expressed the same sentiment I’ve heard after countless rewatches:
Jackie: I maintain that Walter’s biggest (only?) flaw is that he has allergies.
Moira: Yes, do NOT get me started on poor, sweet Walter, who is just doing his best and who got his mom’s beautiful ring resized for Annie.
Feeling empathy for Walter isn’t the issue, but focusing on it so completely misses the larger power of the scene. The fantasy here is a woman leaving a man for reasons that even she is struggling to fully understand and instead of being met with anger and frustration, this man who isn’t right for her still understands her and holds space for her feelings. He doesn’t demand logic and he doesn’t try to reason his way out of the breakup. He sees her and doesn’t need the bonds of a relationship to respect how she feels. When you spell it out this way, there’s no question as to why any woman could read this as a total fantasy, and that’s clearly where Ephron was pulling inspiration from.
She revisits the concept in 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, when Kathleen (Meg Ryan) and Frank (Greg Kinnear) end things over dinner. Frank is terrified to break Kathleen’s heart by ending it, only to realize she’s not in love with him anymore, either, and the two actually laugh together. When Frank asks her if there’s someone else, Kathleen only replies, “No… but there’s the dream of someone else.”
There’s no confusion for Frank. Again, no anger or resentment. And the fantasy is replayed again: a woman feels compelled to leave a relationship that seems to make so much sense on paper for reasons she struggles to comprehend and her partner, the one she must leave, supports the decision. They may not be in love, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand her.
Looking at Ephron’s oeuvre, what brings the romcom trope to light is comparing these two films to one of her first, Heartburn.
Heartburn, which is based on her novel of the same name, is Ephron at her most autobiographical. It’s an examination of her tumultuous marriage to (and divorce from) reporter Carl Bernstein. Rachel (Meryl Streep) is already divorced from her first husband when she meets Mark (Jack Nicholson). The story progresses as expected: they fall in love, they get married, they buy a house, they have kids… and Mark cheats. As Ephron would later write of her divorce, “Once you find out he’s cheated on you, you have to keep finding it out, over and over and over again, until you’ve degraded yourself so completely that there’s nothing left to do but walk out.”
When Rachel finally leaves Mark for the last time, it is obvious that he doesn’t understand why. His attitude at all points shrugs of, “You knew what you were getting into, what did you expect?” It’s the opposite of an amicable breakup. It’s sitting across from the man you love—one you’ve shared years and all the minutes and moments that make up a life with—and when you finally tell him why you have to leave, he stares at you blankly, blind-sided and perplexed by a decision that he of all people should have seen coming. The amicable breakup is a remedy to the heartbreak of realizing the person you loved most never knew you at all.
But while Ephron’s films give us the clearest examples of the trope and the pain it’s a response to, it’s hardly confined to her work. The 1949 Christmas movie Holiday Affair, directed by Don Hartman, serves up one of the all-time great amicable breakups and it doesn’t shy away from spelling out exactly why it matters.
Widow Connie (Janet Leigh) is dating an all-around standup guy, Carl (Wendell Corey), and inching slowly toward marrying him to give her young son a father when she meets Steve (Robert Mitchum). When Connie’s connection with Steve forces her to realize she’s been closing herself off to love, it’s Carl who helps her understand it. He pushes her toward realizing that letting Steve get away would be a colossal mistake and then, in the film’s most startlingly tender moment, waves away any lingering guilt she might be feeling by telling her, “No time’s wasted that makes two people friends.”
Holiday Affair may be choosing an expedient way to get Carl out of the picture, but it’s also providing a crucial alternative view to a breakup. Just because his time with Connie didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean it was wasted. Even in ‘49, the trope serves to provide a woman with the kindness and understanding so often lacking in traditional heteronormative relationships at the time. It’s no wonder this romcom trope had staying power.
It resurfaces again stronger than ever even in more modern efforts, like 2001’s The Wedding Planner, but this time, it’s our leading man who needs to leave his bride. Steve (Matthew McConaughey), already hopelessly in love with our leading lady JLo, catches his fiance Fran before they exchange vows and asks her point blank, “Why do you want to marry me?” Fran is frazzled and immediately gets defensive, horrified he might be backing out of the wedding. But Steve persists, insisting he’ll still go through with the wedding if she can answer the question. When Fran finally admits aloud that she doesn’t know anymore, we see the kind of conversation for which the amicable breakup was made: Two people who love each other realizing they need to walk away.
When Steve puts Fran in a cab, she asks fearfully, “What are we gonna do now?” and he just reassures her: “That’s the beauty of it — whatever we want.” Their amicable breakup is about honoring what they once had and how they’ve changed and then setting each other free. Where in another film Fran could easily be the villain, instead she gets this beautiful moment of hope for a new, different, and ultimately better life. That’s what the amicable breakup trope can actually do.
On the surface level, the reason these amicable moments feel so good is that they are the cathartic conclusions to the conflict of the relationships we’ve seen on screen. Every character ends up feeling a little gentler, a little rounder, and by extension, so do we. But there’s a deeper catharsis for so many of us whose relationships did not end neatly or kindly nor with any level of understanding. So when expertly used, it’s a tool for speaking to the kinds of women’s fantasies that can be overshadowed by romantic love.
The amicable breakup makes space for women to be seen and known and ultimately have their humanity validated by someone who no longer wants or needs anything from them. It shows their value outside of romantic love. This romcom trope is one truth writ large: it’s one thing to love and be loved. It’s another entirely to be understood.