What was most compelling to me was the way the movie allowed the three men to pitch Tracy versions of her future by pitching her versions of herself. My friend Olivia once perfectly described The PS as: “Men explain Katharine Hepburn to Katharine Hepburn,” and, indeed, this is the whole bag. She is described as a goddess, a queen, and a golden girl over the course of the movie, and we come to understand that if Tracy chooses one man over another, she will not only have a different life, she will be a different version of herself. She will become a different person. And so, in this way, Tracy can choose who she wants to be…insomuch as she can choose her husband. The range of options for her identity is limited to those presented by the men. And as a result, the options are less than ideal.

To conflate the choice of a romantic partner with the choice of one’s own identity might strike you as retrograde, but as a fourteen-year-old girl trying on various identities of my own, it made total sense. Who was I, anyway? I was looking for someone to tell me. I was used to a limited range of accessible identities being presented to me—this was how the other teen-girl things I liked worked: mood ring shades and astrology signs and nail-polish colors and birthstone earrings and personality quizzes. I accepted these cheap placeholders for any kind of realer, deeper understanding of who I was or might be. You never got to choose freely. All you could do was pick from the options presented to you. Why should love be any different?