7 Rom-Coms That Are Secretly About Grief, Not Love

Romantic comedies often get reduced to their own surface mechanics, possibly more than any other genre. Aspects such as the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the airport dash, the happy ending and countless others. But ironically, some of the most enduring entries in this category are not about falling in love at all. They are more about loss, the grief that comes with it, and losing a relationship, or a version of yourself and using romance as the vehicle to process it rather than the core driving force of the narrative. With two rom-com classics in About Time and Sleepless in Seattle hitting Netflix on September 1st, now feels like the right moment to revisit why films like these two have held up so much longer than their genre peers.