The way Hollywood depicts it, love is “wonderful”. Anyone who has been in love knows it’s not always so easy. There are endless ups and downs and all arounds. Too often, someone ends up with a broken heart.

Not So Wonderful

There’s nothing quite like opening your heart to another person. That surge of emotions is like a bomb about to go off. Adrenaline surges. Should you clip the blue wire or the red one? On the one hand, if everything goes well, BOOM! You are celebrating life. Make the wrong choice. BOOM! You are shattered into a million little pieces.

The lucky ones find a love that lasts, albeit with attention and effort. The rest have to find a way to deal with the aftermath. Some people jump into the next relationship while others close themselves off to avoid the pain. In the end, if we do not open ourselves to the possibility of love, we may never find it.

All we can do is hope for a happy ending.

A Better Ending?

No one wanted that happy ending more than John Hughes. No wonder he hated the ending for Pretty in Pink. His original script brought Andie and Duckie together as a couple, but test audiences hated it. They were too enamored with the handsome Andrew McCarthy as “major appliance” Blane, and Hughes was forced to throw Duckie under the bus.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, the “final” plot is simple. A poor girl falls for a rich guy. The rich guy asks her to the prom but dumps her before the big day when he worries his friends won’t approve. Instead, she goes to the prom with her male best friend, a guy who has loved her his entire life. The rich guy shows up and without any effort wins back the poor girl.

That’s right. The guy who stands by her side through thick and thin, the guy who makes her laugh, the guy who actually brings her to the prom, the guy who literally holds her hand minutes before Mr. Handsome shows up, he gets dumped without a second glance.

What Andie did to Duckie was as bad, even worse, than what Blane did to her. She led him on and then abandoned him when it was convenient.

Role Reversal

With Some Kind of Wonderful, Hughes sets that wrong to right using a little role reversal.

In this case, a poor guy falls for a rich girl. The poor guy asks a rich girl on a date and the rich girl says yes because she wants to make an old boyfriend jealous. The poor guy brings his female best friend, a gal who is clearly in love with him, along on the date as their chauffeur. Then the poor guy realizes he is really in love with his best friend and breaks up with the rich girl.

Hughes is not saying to fall in love with your best friend. What he is saying is that you should not ignore what’s right in front of you for something that on the surface seems bigger and greater, whether in love or life in general. Odds are that surface gloss is just an illusion.

The trick is to look deeper. What do you really want? What makes you happy? More to the point, who supports you? Who makes you feel special? Who adds that extra sparkle to your day? Make choices like your future depends on it.

“You look good wearing my future”, the poor boy (Eric Stoltz) says to his best friend (Mary Stuart Masterson) when he hands her the pair of diamond earrings he bought with his college fund.

That’s what I call a happy ending. BOOM!