“I Guess This is Growing Up:” How I Took All the Wrong Lessons from ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’
I’m not exactly sure where my love of teen comedies came from. I was a big time horror kid. I loved comics and superheroes. I loved a lot of nerdy stuff, which made my interest in very mainstream and “normal” movies seem like the weird thing, somehow. If anything, I think my love of horror led to my love of rom-coms in a surprising and roundabout way. The ’80s and ’90s gave us a small but strong boom of teen monster comedies and I loved each and every one of them. Teen Wolf kicked off the mild craze, but I didn’t love it as much as what followed. My Best Friend is a Vampire and My Boyfriend’s Back were two of my childhood favorites. My love of those movies allowed me to tiptoe into rom-coms without monsters and lo and behold, I loved them too. Growing up, a boy watching rom-coms would be relentlessly made fun of. Thankfully, I didn’t care as much about that in middle school because I was relentlessly made fun of anyway. Any specific reasons were interchangeable, they were just noise. And I’m glad I indulged my own interest in rom-coms because it was a hell of an age for them. The late ’90s, when I started to take a serious interest, gave us the likes of She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You and my personal favorite, Can’t Hardly Wait.
I spent a long time wondering why I had such an interest in sappy teen comedies when I was so feverishly into horror as a kid, but it’s actually really simple. As long as I loved horror and superheroes and all of the weird stuff I cherish, I’ve also been a hopeless romantic to a fault. It worked out eventually, thank God, but that also means an entire youth in which it really, really didn’t. I had my first crush in first grade after a dream in which I rescued one of the girls in my class from shadowy cartoon demons. In third grade, I suspected a new girl of being a vampire as a flimsy excuse to think and speak of her more than anyone else and eventually just admitted to my crush. But then came fourth grade and the crush that defined my young life.
I had gone to school with a girl named Ashley pretty much that whole time and barely knew who she was. We hadn’t ever happened to be in the same class until fourth grade, where at first I just felt like I didn’t like her and didn’t know the reason why. She was friends with my cousin who was much more popular and beloved than I and had a tendency to make my life a living hell. But then, one day on the field during recess, my buddies and I sat there and watched a group of the other kids playing soccer. My friend Chris said of Ashley, “You know, she kind of looks like the girl in My Girl.” As a nine-year-old, that was high praise and at that moment, a stray soccer ball happened to fly through the air and hit me square in the head. And that swift knock to the head kicked off a crush that lasted for years.
The girl, who had barely known I existed in the first place, only seemed to somehow know who I was even less as that crush went on and on. Eventually Chris, figuring he was helping me, told her and a few select friends and suddenly the entire school knew. That crush became the thing that defined me through middle school.
I didn’t know how to talk to my friends about it, even if I never shut up about her. Clearly anything I told Chris would just get back to her and my friend Pete usually had realistic crushes that occasionally led to at least some degree of short-lived romantic success (as much success as you could have with these things when you were 12) and so I didn’t know what else to do. Once again, it was my other best friend — movies — that came through. To an extent.
I first saw Can’t Hardly Wait on TV when I was almost certainly looking for something else, but something about it gripped me from the opening moments. I was certainly lured in by all the familiar faces from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show I was falling hard for at the time. But it was the film itself that grabbed me. Preston Myers was a lovelorn schmuck just like I was, in love with a girl who didn’t even know he existed, who he had had a crush on all through high school. He was just like me, I thought. Maybe too much. And when he narrated that movie, it felt like he was speaking directly to me. It felt like my own exact situation projected on the screen. Even more than that, though, it felt like a grim glimpse into my future. Preston had loved Amanda since the first day of high school, had made it to graduation without ever making a move, and part of me could see that’s what I was in for.
That was the lesson I should have taken, at the very least to close it up and bring that crush to a screeching halt and save myself years of time. Instead, I listened to the character in the movie. Preston preached about finding “the right moment” and that was exactly what I needed as well. It’s frustrating in retrospect, because it’s like I didn’t even watch the whole film. The right moment thing really doesn’t work out for him. But I had made up my young mind. As a kid, the anxious and neurotic — and delusional — protagonist of this movie had it all figured out. He was just like me, he’d had a pathetic crush that hadn’t gone anywhere for years on a girl he didn’t even know and had barely ever spoken to, but it all worked out and he landed the girl from I Know What You Did Last Summer. Again, I was a horror kid first and foremost, so that was all I knew Jennifer Love Hewitt from. It was everything I thought I wanted to hear at that time.
After that, I became obsessed with finding the right moment. My first self-declared “moment” was the class trip to AMC Camp, a camp really not that far from the school where we basically went through the entire experience of summer camp for a weekend in the dead of fall. For some reason I had it firmly in my head that experiences outside of the normal school environment, with the students largely on their own and left to their own devices would bring certain people closer together. Probably because that’s exactly what movies had taught me. I still had some fun, but the trip was hindered by my mom’s decision to come along as a chaperone. She had to bunk with a group of tween girls and try to get them under control each night, though, so she had her whole own mess of things to deal with. I thought for sure that being there in the “great outdoors” not even technically outside of town would be the perfect opportunity to get closer to my crush and tell her how I really felt.
I did not speak to her once, but everyone who had not yet caught onto my notorious crush became very aware of it. Not long after that, perhaps even because of it, she would even make attempts to talk to me. She’d start to say “hi” in the halls every now and then, clearly feeling sorry for me and I would mutter a completely unintelligible response. Her friends, all of whom absolutely hated me, my cousin in particular, would even begrudgingly come up to me at recess and say “She wants to talk to you,” and I still wouldn’t do it. I even got mad at them for even saying that, because I knew they had to be playing some kind of practical joke to make fun of my misfortune. Looking back, I really don’t think they were doing that at all.
I next thought my moment would come, for some ungodly reason, on the seventh grade white water rafting trip. I have no idea why young me was so convinced that class trips in the outdoors would spark romance, but nothing like that ever happened. Instead, all that happened was that substitute teacher Mr. Nettleton fell out of his raft and we had to both rescue and awkwardly find a spot for him in ours. There wasn’t even a spark of a spark with the girl. Yet I, against my better judgment, would not give up. Even though nothing I was doing could really be considered “trying.”
My obsession with finding “the moment” only grew and I hoped, like Preston, that fate would intervene. I didn’t actually want to do any of the work to make this clearly unattainable thing happen, I just wanted it to fall into my lap. And each time I would try and wait for the moment that the universe would give me a sign, I would watch Can’t Hard Wait. Each time, for better or worse, it would inspire me. Then came the dance. The moment if ever there was one. It was the last dance of seventh grade, and I was riding a year’s worth of heartache and pining for a girl to whom I still had barely spoken a single word. All my pent up middle school anxiety came pouring out all at once. I was a mess. I wanted to dance with the girl but I couldn’t even talk to her and it drove me crazy. My not doing anything wasn’t just preteen fear, though. It wasn’t even that I was worried about rejection. I was certain of rejection. Everybody was. This crush had never been anything remotely realistic and for all of my posturing and waxing poetic about love and the universe, I had never actually deluded myself that much. I knew what was up. I just went out of my way not to admit it to myself.
That dance was the one time I really let myself get my hopes up. If I could talk to her, dance with her, it would all be worthwhile. Maybe an actual connection could be made, as stupid and awkward as I was. Or, as my friends would always say as they tried their very best to support me, “Maybe she’ll think you’re funny.” I didn’t care, though. It felt for the first time like the stars had actually aligned in my favor, like the very intangible concept of destiny that Preston went on about in Can’t Hardly Wait was finally going to come through for me. I did not even ask her to dance, I didn’t remotely have the stomach for that. I had my friends do it instead. But she said yes.
My heart had never pounded faster and louder than when we started moving in circles with my fingers barely touching her hips as the music started to play. Our school dances had pretty much one slow song, Pearl Jam’s “Last Kiss,” which was wildly inappropriate and horrific for the situation. But I didn’t care. I was completely in the moment, awkwardly, silently dancing and not making eye contact with a girl nearly a foot taller than me. And then one of her friends, dancing next to her, started gossiping and they broke into a gossip circle and just left me standing there. Alone. She came back and apologized and for the first time, even at thirteen, I remember wanting to stand up for myself. I wanted to tell her that she knew what it meant to me — had in fact known for years — and could have at least tried to put a little effort into a single dance. But I finally had the moment I needed to put the crush behind me once and for all. Except I said nothing and that crush continued on for one more delusional year, because that’s the kind of kid I was.
Can’t Hardly Wait still remains one of my favorite comedies of all time. It was the thing that sparked my love of films that take place over the course of a single evening. I loved the ensemble cast, the party, the fact that every single character had something different going on, from the closed off best friend to the band that breaks up and gets back together during a single party to the guy who just steals things in the background. And I loved that before the happy, romantic ending, Preston does get called on his bullshit, he does realize that the way he’d seen things didn’t work, even if actually getting the girl does undercut that a bit. I have always gone to bat for Can’t Hardly Wait as an underrated teen rom com of its era and I probably always will. But it is absolutely not a blueprint for any kind of actual love advice and I’m very glad that I eventually realized that.
When I did find love, actual love and not projected crush love, it happened organically as things should do. We knew the same people, we became friends, we grew closer together and the ball kept rolling from there. The universe never intervened to give me a sign, I had to make the decision — and, yes, make the move — for myself. There are no “right moments” at the end of the day. There are only right people, and if you follow your gut and not a teen comedy you were barely old enough to understand, you’ll know them when you see them and things will happen if you let them. I never stopped loving ’90s teen comedies, by any stretch, but I did thankfully stop using Can’t Hardly Wait as a guide to how love is supposed to work. And sure, when my wife and I first started watching movies together, that was one of the first that I showed her. We laughed at a comedy that still, for the most part, holds up. And I also laughed at myself, at the kid who thought any of this was a realistic or attainable idea, laughed at a youth that may have drowned in ignorance but was, at the end of the day, incredibly well spent.
