The movie How To Be Single came to theaters this past weekend, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Emerging from a movie months ago, I saw a poster advertising How To Be Single and I knew I had to see the movie, especially since the cast included Rebel Wilson, Fat Amy from the Pitch Perfect movies.

As expected, Wilson was great highlight for adding her dosage of raunchy humor.

However, by and large, the movie was disappointing. The plot felt like it was all over the place and, as a result, does not provide a clear message on or guide to how to be single.

The structure begins strong. Alice, Dakota Jackson, is freshly out of a relationship. Between her sister Meg, Leslie Mann, and her new-found co-worker and friend Robin, Rebel Wilson, she is presented with two very different models of singlehood.

Alice is not Meg who is a workaholic committed to remaining single and not Robin who parties every night and engages in casual relationships. Like the majority of us, Alice is on the spectrum between two extremes and is simply struggling to find her own way in the middle.

Although the movie is supposedly about singlehood, essentially the entire movie explores relationships: casual, serious, and anything in between.

The character Meg embodies a valid concern of becoming so accustomed to being single that she has a hard time accepting new people into her life. However, that concern seemed out of place in a movie titled How To Be Single and better suited for a movie titled How To Accept Love.

Through the character Robin, Alice is introduced to the Hollywood vision of single life. Apart from the concern that this vision is not entirely realistic, it also fails to show Alice and the audience the beauty of single life beyond simply not being tied down. As a result, the movie offers a fairly unhelpful answer to the prompt of how to be single.

Cliches are not the most provocative tools for writing a movie script, but they are not the worst crutches to use when needed. However, this movie includes multiple cliches jumbled together that ultimately detract from Alice’s story and belong in their own movie altogether.

How To Be Single had the workaholic who eventually welcomes a man into her life, the single woman after the ideal spouse who eventually ties the knot with an unlikely option, and even the player who develops eyes for only one (the player was rejected, which was a nice break from the usual scenario).

Do you know what all those cliches have in common? They all include characters who choose to speed off in pursuit of a relationship and leave the single life in their rear view mirror.

Our main character Alice also avoids being alone by beginning a casual relationship with a bartender and later jumping into a relationship with a widower.

Beyond the irony of a movie about single life rarely capturing moments of single life, I found the flatness of Alice’s character irritating as well.

The script expresses that she likes reading and nature, but as an audience member, I did not really buy it or feel it. While she may have hobbies of her own and a personality of her own, they are both easily given up whenever she is around others, which she is for nearly the entire movie.

Still, her bland, one-dimensionality may have been purposeful for the plot. As Robin points out, Alice has no idea who she is and is incredibly impressionable as she molds herself to her current companions – who are typically love interests.

While I found it annoying that the only glimpse of Alice utilizing her singlehood to engage in pursuits she enjoys does not take place until the last few seconds of the movie, perhaps she was just not ready to truly be single until that point in time.

Life does not follow your agenda. Alice had the plan to be single, learn about herself, and get back together with her ex-boyfriend. She followed Robin’s example of the single life style and ran back to her ex-boyfriend who no longer wished to be with her.

After that, she kept herself busy, but she did not take the time to pursue her desires and learn about herself. She was holding out for her ex-boyfriend and it took him chasing her for “one more for the sake of old times” before he got married to another woman to wake her up.

The times that you are single are arguably when you are truly living and are truly yourself. I am glad Alice finally got to those last few seconds of the movie to see that even if, as an audience member, I found it to be a long wait with little applicable advice on how to be single.