With all due respect, I don't think sex (or the lack thereof) is the reason that so many romantic comedies make many people want to rip out their fingernails to jam them into their eyes and ears.
And while it may be that I'm just not cynical enough, I don't tend to feel that sex is the only drive for romance, either. If it was, there would be no romantic comedies let alone so many of them doing so well; we would instead be wishing that pornography had better scripts.
I have to confess that I've liked a fair number of romantic comedies. In the good ones, you like the people you're watching well enough to hope that they get together because they seem like they'd make one another happy and you want them to be happy. (That they might make one another happy horizontally comes second.)
But the most likable people in the world will frustrate you purple when they act like puppets. Especially when they act out of character in order to fulfil the mandatory romcom checklist. Or when we're supposed to forget what's come before because "that's how romantic comedies go."
*SPOILERS AHEAD*- for some movies that are a few years old. Can't be helped.
Take "How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days". Both hero and heroine have, in essence, started their relationship on the basis of a bet. But hers is that she can treat a man so abysmally that he'll choose to dump her. So he spends the entire movie being nice to her and putting up with her, and she deliberately finds ways to irritate him to prove her point. It is perhaps a credit to Kate Hudson that her character is still halfway likable despite this contrivance, but even still, when (inevitably) their respective bets are revealed and the third-act break-up goes off, he still ends up having to run after her.
Even worse is "Hitch", in which the "heroine" abuses the hero in his attempts to court her throughout the movie and then not only does an enormous harm to his life but nearly undoes much of the good he's done for many people on the basis of a misunderstanding she's rushed to the worst possible interpretation of in record time. And he still ends up running after her. It's truly amazing that the writers didn't realize that half the audience at this point is rooting for her to apologize at the very least (she never does), if not get a villain-style comeuppance.
"The Truth About Cats and Dogs" at least has the grace to have the heroine come after the hero after the third-act-misunderstanding-separation, and invests both with enough charm that we don't root against their coming together.
"My Best Friends Wedding" goes one better- it eschews the inevitable pairing up at the end for the far more likely reality that the heroine's best friend is indeed going to stay with the perfectly lovely young woman he's chosen to marry in the first place. Ironically, "Made of Honor" (don't look at me, it was my wife's choice)- uses the same premise but flips the genders and then fails to notice that "MBFW"'s ending is enormously superior, especially given the extent to which we're shown that the "hero" is in fact kind of a callow jerk and the heroine's fiancee is an enormously successful and capable man who, unlike said "hero", actually had the sense to see the heroine's worth before she was in danger of being taken away.
*END SPOILERS*
I guess what it comes down to is that we're willing to see likable people together, but GOOD romantic comedies never railroad their audience. You can get away with a certain amount of formula if your characters and their dialogue is well written and we like and identify with them. But heaven help you if the tropes of the genre are pulling in a direction that we don't believe, or worse, don't want to go.
So... Is the writing good enough and the characters likable enough to be worth watching without the unquestionable draw of seeing Anne Hathaway naked?
