Critics have long decried the odes to normative depictions of courtship, romance, love and marriage that are romantic comedies. Rare is the rom-com blockbuster that deviates much from the traditional script: Man meets woman (who is effortlessly beautiful, but also the girl next door). Man is not totally interested, for fairly mundane reasons. But after lots of buildup and “duh” moments, man realizes woman is the one. In the movies, last-minute love is everlasting and almost always wins. The saccharine, feel-good moments will drive any skeptic bonkers, and the relationships among gender, desire and expectations are overwhelmingly outdated. Yet somehow, we can’t stop watching these movies — perhaps with the hope that this time it will be different.

“Trainwreck,” written by and starring the current patron saint of feminist comedy, Amy Schumer, purports to flip the rom-com script by making Schumer’s character, Amy, commitment-phobic and her love interest, Aaron, played by Bill Hader, steadily pro-relationship. And who better to rewrite the script of traditional rom-coms? Schumer’s Comedy Central show, “Inside Amy Schumer,” engages critically with topics such as beauty standards, the male gaze and sexuality while still managing to be really funny. Although “Trainwreck” — the title a knowing nod toward the social tendency to prescriptively judge and label women’s behavior — has feminist moments, it nonetheless follows the patterns of traditional rom-coms, including at the end, when the guy gets the girl (or in this case, the girl gets the guy). Which raises the question, Is it even possible for a rom-com to radicalize romance?

At first glance, we appear to be well on our way. There has been a recent uptick in the number of rom-coms that depict a more diverse vision of the standard female protagonist. She is no longer a woman vying for romance but an independent women who is ambivalent about finding love. Amy in “Trainwreck” is a great example of this: She’s into her career, has sex like a man, has major intimacy issues (she hates when guys sleep over after sex) and isn’t particularly nice or sweet. Similarly, the protagonist in “Bridesmaids,” Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig), is an honest portrayal of a woman who isn’t ready to get married; she’s also a bit of a mess and is devastated that her best friend (Maya Rudolph) is getting married.

While directors and writers have become adept at infusing the rom-com formula with feminist humor and self-aware criticisms of the genre, few of them are able to break from the script of the happy couple at the end. Though these movies gave us a vision of something different, their main characters largely end up finding a romantic partner. And even in these cinematic attempts to uphold alternate modes of romantic fulfillment, it’s hard to imagine that those storylines are possible in real life for someone who is not like the protagonist — white or thin.

After all, in real life, romance doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s shaped by social expectations and their influence on our desires, from a reliance on patriarchal notions such as chivalry or the arrival of a Prince Charming to the barriers that stand between many of us — based on where we live, what we look like or how the world perceives us — and actually living our romantic dreams.