When Harry Met Sally Essay

Have you ever had a friendship with the opposite sex that was solely platonic, or so you thought? When Harry Met Sally is a romantic comedy that takes place over 12 years and follows two college graduates turned friends, best friends, then lovers. Harry Burns and Sally Albright first met after graduating from the University of Chicago. They share a drive to New York City where they’d both begin the rest of their lives. The film follows their immediate dislike of one another in the car ride, to their lives later on as they continue to bump into one another, slowly becoming closer and closer friends. From their first interaction, Harry expresses his belief that men and women cannot be friends. Sally, being extremely headstrong and resolute, completely

Due to the timeframe of this film, there is an evolution of the characters from who they are at 21 when the movie starts to 31 when they finally become lovers. In their first introduction, they are both recent college graduates. With this being said, they carried different communication styles. Harry begins as a hardcore believer that men and women cannot be friends stating, “…men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way” (Reiner). This communication style comes from his gender and his maturity level, assuming that all men and women have some sort of sexual desire toward one another. Sally, on the other hand, is more indirect and expressive. While she tells him she disagrees at the time, she actually proves his point over the course of their decade-long friendship. After their first two meetings, when their friendship really starts to develop, you can see that men and women being friends is possible, but in their situation, their connection became too deep to remain friendly. Another expectation that Harry and Sally had to experience some sort of romantic attraction was societal standards. At the time period, this film was set, the 1980s, society’s expectations were that men and women should be romantically involved. So if you were to see Harry and

The elongated plot strengthens the thesis as it proves through Harry and Sally’s various meetings that they could’ve remained friends, but they let their connections get too deep with each other. They both spent years hanging out as “friends” before deciding they had feelings. The interviews with real-life couples proved that time strengthens relationships, and it did so with Harry and Sally. While the overarching point of the interviews was to prove that Harry and Sally could face challenges and still end up with each other, it also shows how deep their relationship became because of how long their story lasted. For the majority of the film, these interviews strengthen the audience's idea of Harry and Sally’s relationship, because it shows that they could start their relationship as friends, and eventually turn it into a romantic relationship, because of how close they became with each other. The film comes to an end with Harry and Sally happily married, sitting in the same interview as the real-life couples, and it proves that a couple's love for one another is so much stronger with a deeper connection. Even looking at society's expectations, which assumed all men and women should