Where Has Wining-and-Dining Gone?

So, I’m just going to come right out and say it:  I don’t really get this whole “friends with benefits” thing.

There, I’ve done it. It’s like I just declared myself an official member of the old fogie club.

Right up front, let me clarify that I’m mostly talking about the relationship status “friends-with-benefits” as opposed to the movie, Friends With Benefits, since I haven’t yet seen the movie. But I’m going to make an educated guess that there’s much related between the two.

So it makes me wonder about whether seeing it is worth plunking down that $10.50 ticket price—who am I kidding, before my husband and I plunk down the 21-bucks, plus babysitter costs, plus dinner and/or movie food.

The movie Friends With Benefits stars Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis as two single adults who make a pact to have a relationship that’s a purely sexual one. I’ve seen both actors in the media everywhere of late, being terribly funny as they promote the heck out of the movie. It opens this Friday at the Bow-Tie Cinemas’ Wilton 4 theater.

I read a recent piece in the Huffington Post about the kind of relationship the movie’s screenwriters were trying to capture and portray in the film. Calling their movie an “anti-rom-com,” they said they were inspired by single women they knew who lived their lives following the sexual trends of today’s generation of young adults.

I guess we can assume that means a lot less emotional attachments to sexual relationships that goes along with the technological innovations of late night sexting, casual Facebook friending and Foursquare-booty call abetting.

Look, each generation’s evolutions and revolutions are scandalous to the generations before. My mom couldn’t figure out why we used to “go out” in high school. “Going out” was defined as an exclusive boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but it was never referred to as “going steady.” She used to extol the benefits of her generation’s “dating,” which basically meant getting picked up by a boy in his father’s Cadillac and being taken to the soda shop for a malt (or so George Lucas taught me).

Conversely I’ve heard about today’s high schoolers, who are perhaps not as raunchy as those depicted on the now-cancelled MTV series “Skins,” but still I’ve read the trend stories about their supposedly cavalier attitude toward sex and intimacy. Seems what was one generation’s slut is now a lifestyle choice.

In other words, the more things change, the less they stay the same.

Generations can’t help but change and be different than the ones that precede them. I know the late sixties and the early seventies had their fair share of liberated “free love.” My generation tended to couple off and settle down later than our parents, and some of the resulting work-vs-family or infertility issues are but two of the many resulting complications.

So it goes to figure that the generation that follows mine will be different in its attitudes about family, love and commitment. And I’m not a prude when it comes to my own attitudes about sexuality. But I wonder if an anti-rom-com helps romanticize the idea of leaving behind intimacy and commitment and long-term connection?

It seems the kinds of relationships my generation grew up thinking were ideal are becoming so much less appealing these days. I’ve had more than one recent conversation with twenty-something family members and co-workers where they’ve said a variation on the following: “Trust me, there’s no way I’m having kids.”

Maybe I’m just outgrowing the target demographic of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. I've seen way too many movies not think they'll probably wind up happily ever after anyway. It's just entertainment, after all. I didn’t need to have stormed the beaches at Normandy to appreciate Saving Private Ryan, so perhaps seeing Timberlake and Kunis try to emulate Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell will be just something much simpler:

Date night with my husband.