Platonic Ideals

Last night was the second time I saw this romantic comedy I like very much, and which I liked as much on the second viewing, I Love You, Man.  So this would be about the seventh time I've seen a romantic comedy I liked, counting rewatchings of Addicted To Love and The Truth About Cats & Dogs.  When I watch a film, the first thing I'm watching is always the writing, and this is about the most expertly written romantic comedy I've seen.  What I mainly have against romantic comedies is the ubiquitous device where what comes between the obviously fated lovers is a misunderstanding that, once the characters actually speak to each other to clarify it, leaves them happily in each other's arms, which annoys me with the implication that they are complete idiots.  I Love You, Man avoids this by having the characters' real actions hurt and grate on each other, but then have them apologise and forgive after an appropriate amount of time.  The way the characters get gradually revealed to each other and to us just makes me really happy.  I suppose I'm especially susceptible to films like this since I have both a great interest in how lonely people are supposed to make friends and how relationships function between men of the same gender. 

There's problems with it too, of course, ones typical of the--UGH--"bromantic" genre: of a cast of intricately bequirked characters, the only one lacking development is the girlfriend, played by the winning (if preppily-clad) Rashida Murphy, whose only apparent characteristic is that while she seems to adore processing issues to help along her fiancée's plot development, she has never engaged and was never planning to engage with him about what he likes in bed.  The guyfriend (played by 250 pounds of Jason Segel in a 180-pound bag), on the other hand, with his...well, I was going to list his character-revealing quirks but they are vast like the ocean--he's fucking fascinated with Paul Rudd's sex life, intent on improving it.  And subsequently intent on introducing breakup-inducing tension into Rudd's romantic relationship. 

Why I bring it up, though, is that I think in the future this will be regarded as an early polyamory film, the same way The Kids Are All Right won't.  The movie treats the relationship between the male leads as nominally nonsexual, but they do tongue each other, and get involved in each others' sex lives in advisory capacities, and the ultimate scene is the two of them repeatedly confessing love for each other before the film zooms out and fades on the straight wedding.  The primary partner's encouragement of the second relationship and subsequent jealousy, the secondary partner's passive-aggression, and all the characters' insistence throughout the film that "what I said to you was supposed to stay between you and me!"--it's textbook. 

While I'm no polyamorist--surely one of the major perks of getting into a longterm relationship is you can stop dating--I think the ideals of communicative honesty, trust, respect and mutual accommodation that polyamory, queer, and BDSM types have built to support nonstandard relationship structures are laudable and should be studied by anyone who wants to be with another person.  And I think that some variation on the relationship structures they're hammering out today will be the future if the arc of the future keeps bending towards sexual tolerance and egalitarianism, which is why it was the subject of the second Futurama movie.  But I could be wrong, and it could be that people are always gonna be more willing to live in some rickety (or "time-honored") prefab structure than go through all the honesty and processing and work it would take to plan and build something to suit themselves.