Love, Happiness, Kids – Choose Two

And so is the tagline for the new-ish movie, Friends With Kids. In it, two best friends decide that, instead of waiting to get married and inevitably have their marriage ruined by kids like their friends have, they dive right in and have kids together, figuring it’s better to have a baby with your best friend versus a partner.

This way, they reason, you can separate the messy stuff (changing diapers, who has free time when, making money to support the child, etc) from the fun, sexy stuff (loud sex, date nights, movie nights). The best friends decide to have sex, make a baby and then split everything 50/50. They’ll each be able to date other people and have built-in babysitting for it. They’ll be able to have their cake and eat it too.

I won’t say how it ends but considering I rarely see a movie all the way through, I definitely thought it was worth a watch.

I thoroughly enjoyed it because it showed three different relationships in the span of one movie—the male/female best friend relationship, where everything just thinks “Ugh, why don’t you just get together already?!”; the married couple with a bunch of kids who bicker and fight but still love each other fiercely; and the married with kids couple who has emotionally thrown in the towel but refuse to separate for appearances’ sake.

I’ve been there—screaming at your husband to get out of the bathroom, wondering why he gets to take a dump in peace when you haven’t so much as sat down in a room by yourself in years. Wondering why you have to ask for “help” like you’re the only one who lives there. Trying to have an active sex life when you have little kids sleeping in your bed. There’s so much of parenting that’s universal and it’s cool to see it portrayed in a realistic way onscreen. Plus it has Maya Rudolph in it, one of favorite funny ladies.

It’s available at Redbox (and no, this is not a sponsored post), so go check it out, see if you agree that you can have your cake and eat it too!