break-ups

Guess We Now Know How the 40 Days of Dating Movie Will End

Photo: http://fortydaysofdating.com/

The Internet’s favorite relationship (or, at least, one people most loved to hate) experiment, 40 Days of Dating, is over, and after seeing each other for 40 days, Jessica and Timothy are done. For their final date, they visited Disney Worl,d and afterwards, Jessica penned this: “Our relationship with Disney World, like each other, was deeply conflicted and complicated. We are so wrong for each other in so many ways, and so right for each other in many other ways.” Oof. Long story short, Jessica had fallen for Timothy, who hadn’t fallen for her.

The sad conclusion may disappoint those who were highly invested in their romance working out (or just wanted something to pay off after reading 40 days of wordy diary entries), and also complicates the push to turn it into a movie. When a deal with CAA to sell film rights was first announced, Timothy told Buzzfeed that “We have no interest in making some bad rom-com movie.” This ending certainly makes the site feel like more appropriate subject matter for mumblecore, but even so, does making a movie at all make sense now that we know the ending? Do people want to get invested all over again knowing that it all leads to Jessica shorting out the Country Bear Jamboree with her tears? You could argue that, like any biopic or historical film, knowing the end shouldn’t necessarily prohibit the story being interesting. (And yes, I just lumped 40 Days of Dating in with movies like Zero Dark Thirty and Malcolm X.) But for this particular experiment, the mystery of the outcome seems crucial. Yes, people go to rom-coms knowing full well that the unlikely lovers will end up together, but will they want to go knowing that they will leave knowing that the fantasy of completely artificially engineered and movie-rights-baiting love is dead?

The ‘40 Days of Dating’ Duo Broke Up