I hate to sound like your moany Uncle Raymond, but they just don’t make romcoms like they used to. The likes of 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless and She’s All That have never been replicated in recent times and attempts to recreate the 90s nostalgia have always fallen flat on their face.  

It’s for this reason, I was excited when I saw No Hard Feelings hit the cinemas. The latest Jennifer Lawrence movie was pitched as a hilarious coming-of-age tale for the modern era. The story sees strapped-for-cash millennial Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) hired by the parents of an introverted gen-z lad Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), to help him into blossom into maturity – via the medium of sex. The meddling helicopter mum and dad were concerned their talented 19-year-old was more interested in computer games than socialising and fornication. 

The film is silly. If you’re reading this to establish whether you should go and see it, I would say sure – if you want a low-emotional-investment flick that you’ll watch once but not twice. But the question it raised for me was: How do we know when we’ve grown up?  

If the initial premise of the film is anything to go by, growing up means embracing partying, reckless behaviour, drinking and losing your virginity. This is, probably word for word, how 14-year-old me would have described maturity. In my adolescence, I believed that increased maturity meant more independence. I felt I was most grown-up when tackling things alone. I wanted to be open to all experiences on the spectrum of sensible to reckless. I formed opinions hastily and defended them resolutely. I was desperate to be trusted and to be “my own person”. My parents were a humiliating presence in my life who crowded my decisions with their own, old-fashioned logic. From my perspective; the less they were allowed influence, the better. To me, being an adult involved doing “adult things”, those that came with a legal minimum age requirement.  

This is the kind of “maturing” that Percy is encouraged to do in the film. Maddie orders him a strong alcoholic drink, attempts to lure him into casual sex and persuades him to skinny dip. She instructs him to consider himself an adult and to distance himself from his parents (in fairness they did have a tracker on the 19-year-old’s phone and had hired a woman to take his virginity, so she probably wasn’t wrong in this instance). By all accounts, it seemed Maddie considered maturity to involve the same things as I did at age 14. 

But I’ve come to realise that these milestones are often just touchpoints in a maturing process that is entirely circular. Stay with me on this one; ideally, we start life reliant on those who care for us, ensuring we eat well and get enough sleep, we spend time developing and learning, backing away from things that are likely to cause us pain. Then many of us ‘grow-up' and break free from those who raised us. We are no longer so careful about what we eat or how long we sleep, we begrudgingly continue learning or some shun education altogether. We are enticed by things which may or may not provide a short-term amusement but will definitely harm us in the long term. But the loop closes up.