‘This Is 40’ Helped Me Choose Happiness And End My Marriage

"Seeing 'This Is 40' that night wasn’t the romantic date night I was hoping for, but it ended up being an important wake-up call."

I’m a sucker for romantic comedies. So over 10 years ago, when I started seeing trailers for the movie “This Is 40,” I knew it would be on my date night list. What I didn’t know was how unforgettable that movie would be ― not because of how much I loved it, but because it turned out to be the last movie I saw with my husband before we got divorced.

In “This Is 40,” which premiered Dec. 21, 2012, Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd play Debbie and Pete, a married couple both about to turn 40 while dealing with struggling businesses, parenting two daughters and trying to rediscover a connection in their marriage. I’d been looking forward to seeing the movie for weeks, knowing my husband and I could use a date night with some comic relief, with some way to focus on someone else’s marital problems instead of our own.

The movie was supposed to be date-night gold: a rom-com about the ups and downs of marriage, the complicated relationships between parents and their kids, and the horrors of turning the big 4-0. I was supposed to laugh along with all the other couples in the movie theater, relieved that I still had a few years before the scenarios like mammograms and colonoscopies became my reality.

But the movie wasn’t funny. In fact, by the end of “This Is 40,” I almost hoped the main characters wouldn’t get their happy ending because, as I sat there with a husband who wasn’t laughing either, I knew that we weren’t going to get ours.

Maybe if we hadn’t gotten into an argument before we left for the movie theater. Maybe if the Debbie and Pete characters didn’t spend most of the movie bickering like we did. Maybe if the scene where they “talk to each other the way the therapist told us to talk to each other” didn’t remind me of our own failed attempts at marriage counseling. Maybe I would have thought the movie was hilarious like everyone around me if it didn’t hit so close to home.