To imagine a life beyond loneliness, look to When Harry Met Sally

This month marks 32 years since the release of When Harry Met Sally. Written by the late great Nora Ephron and starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, it launched something of a revolution in dating culture. Relationship topics that had been considered taboo, were analysed at length against a Manhattan backdrop of autumn leaves and Harry Connick Jr’s crooning. The movie’s impact was so seismic it’s fair to say that without Sally there is no Carrie Bradshaw; without Harry, no George Costanza, or Jerry Seinfeld.

Marketed as a romantic comedy, it also represented a quest for a life beyond heartache and loneliness. And with over 13 million in lockdown across Australia– a country that now has more single people living alone than at any other time – it feels comforting, in the way an Oodie is both daggy and somehow very cool to revisit those seminal phrases and ideas about sex and dating.

Maybe we can lose ourselves, if only for a brief moment, in the fizzy chemistry and charming neurosis of Harry and Sally, and their lofty romantic ideals that, along with their late 80s hair and chunky knit sweaters, still manage to hold currency today.

The idea that men and women can’t be friends

It’s Harry who lays down this belief as if it’s the law early on, and the movie itself does little to disprove it. But whether it is true or not is almost beside the point, given how hetero-normative the premise was and how thoroughly the idea burrowed itself into our belief systems. To wit: two decades later, the Scientific American undertook serious research to find out if it were true, concluding it was, kind of, due to the fact that “Men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends”.

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This grave miscalculation of attraction became so common it eventually gave rise to its own catchphrase, coined by comedian Chris Rock in a stand-up set in 1996 and sprayed around the internet by dejected “nice guys” and Incels alike: the Friend Zone.

The introduction of women as being ‘high maintenance’

The phrase is articulated by Harry while he and Sally are watching Casablanca together in their separate apartments. Harry calls Ingrid Bergman ‘low maintenance’ and when Sally queries this, Harry tells her she’s ‘high maintenance’, a description that speaks to Sally’s tightly-wound, Type-A fussiness, particularly in regards to food (which was in reality an homage to Ephron, a food obsessive who would go on to write and direct her own homage to French cooking, Julie and Julia).