Onscreen—across genres, but mostly in the rom-com-sphere—a few key professions dominate the working world. If you’ve spent any meaningful length of time with a Hallmark movie marathon or sifting through Netflix for the latest love story offerings to add to your queue, you know the ones. When the protagonist is a writer or a journalist? Literally of course she is. (Write what you know, right, screenwriters?) With regards to the career of the average love interest, these are not the doctors and lawyers your mother would like you to end up with (yawn). A baker or chef regularly captures the heart of the lead, which feels simple enough to parse as the sex appeal of the culinarily gifted is beyond obvious. But among the most overrepresented jobs in the romance genre, and for love interests in general, is the architect. Somebody has to build a wholesome B&B in our main character’s hometown, someone who might even charm her away from her high-powered, high-pressure NYC job—a job she never really loved, as it turns out. Someone capable, clever, artistic, and for some reason, toned, because in this universe I guess he’s sketching out the blueprints and building the place top to bottom with his own two hands. Swoon!
The trope’s origins
The foundation for this archetype was laid by the likes of Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle and Keanu Reeves in The Lake House, though the pieces had been in place since the 1969 debut of certified family man Mike Brady in The Brady Bunch. Nowadays, I see the trope surface most frequently in the dime-a-dozen holiday movies on streaming platforms that, more often than not, lack the juice to forge the cultural staying power of a Hanks or Reeves vehicle. But since audiences eat them up like Christmas cookies every December, studios continue to churn them out. (It’s me, I’m audiences.)
Hard to say whether this is a trope screenwriters stole from real life or the other way around, but it seems to hold true both in the movies and IRL. Late last year, Vogue’s very own Jack Schlossberg posed a question to his 500,000+ Instagram followers via Stories—specifically to “anyone sexually attracted to men”: What’s the hottest career path? The Kennedy scion narrowed the options down to architect, famous musician, famous VC/PE, and famous chef. The odds were stacked against our hero with three of the four options given the “famous” edge. But the architect still prevailed with 40% of the vote. In an informal survey of my single friends, responses ranged from “yes” to “hell yes” when asked whether they’d be into someone with the title. Apparently, it reads as the perfect blend of left- and right-brained, like a smart—crucially: employed—artist.
The lying/aspiring architect
The architect is such a hot sell onscreen that there is an established canon of characters who have pretended to hold the title specifically to impress a potential date. True Seinfeld fans know George Costanza lies like a rug, but one of his favorite fabulations that pops up in a handful of episodes is his desire to be seen as an architect. (As he complains in the acclaimed season five episode “The Marine Biologist” after one of Jerry’s own lies gets out of hand: “Why couldn’t you make me an architect? You know I’ve always wanted to pretend that I was an architect!”) A chronic job hopper and frequent firee, Costanza doesn’t want to design a new addition to the Guggenheim; he wants to nap under his desk. But he’s looking, as always, for the easiest way to cheat the dating game, and architecture sure seems like an elegant façade to hide his true self behind.
