Given the fact that my friends and I often have a hard time relating to the plights of the common man, given our superhuman abilities and all, it’s easy for me to forget what the average person’s worries are. I mean, when you’re busy saving the world and pummeling opponents in the ring, you don’t have much time to think about things like settling down and having babies.

That John Carter guy is someone I can relate to, but this new Friends with Kids movie is about as foreign to me as a four-armed Martian would be to you. So what happens is these three couples have been friends for several years. Leslie and Alex (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd) and Missy and Ben (Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm) get married, have kids and become miserable. Jason and Julie (Adam Scott (not Tom Cruise, as I first suspected) and Jennifer Westfeldt) aren’t actually a couple, but have been close friends since college. Neither one of them seems to be good at relationships (well, Jason gets some hotties, but they never stick around for long, and neither of them wants to end up as unhappy as the two couples that got married.

A drunken late night joke about Jason and Julie having a baby without the constraints and expectations of a romantic relationship turns into, well, Jason and Julie having a baby without committing to a romantic relationship with one another. In fact, they both encourage each other to date other people, taking turns babysitting their offspring so the other can maintain a social life. Sounds like just the broken home recipe to spawn my next supervillain!

The other two couples are, at first, insulted, then shocked to see that Jason and Julie’s plan actually seems to be working. Julie starts dating a wonderful guy named Kurt (Edward Burns) and Jason’s latest little fling (Megan Fox) lasts longer than anyone is used to. But as Jason and Julie get more and more involved with their significant others, they expect more and more from each other in terms of taking care of the baby. They also start to exhibit signs of jealousy, implying that their feelings for each other might be stronger than either of them would like to admit. I think there was a TV show in the ’80s called thirtysomething that was similar to this, but I’m not certain of that.

Anyway, as their plan finally seems to start unraveling a little, the other two couples find relief in the fact that Jason and Julie may join them in their middle-aged mediocrity (misery loves company, after all). Everything eventually falls apart for everyone involved, which is when Friends with Kids actually starts to get interesting. I’ve heard about the complexities of many human relationships, where figuring out what you need versus what you desire is a difficult task. It’s just such a conflict that I found intriguing with this film.

From what I understand, friends with benefits and open relationships rarely work for the average person. But the situation with Jason and Julie is even more complicated than that, especially when one of them expresses a desire for something to pursue something more than platonic with the other, only to be denied. That kind of emotional pain is not something Flash Gorem is accustomed to, but it seems as if it is even harder to overcome than physical pain. I’ve heard a saying about not knowing what you’ve got till it’s gone, and that definitely becomes the case when the denier later realizes what got away (especially after things don’t work out with the new significant other).

At first, I really hated the seemingly happily-ever-after ending of this dramedy. Then I realized it may not be such a happy ending after all. If the decisions that have been made by all three couples previously in the movie are any indication, it’s highly likely that any new decisions (especially those driven by mixtures of emotion, lust and regret) could be even bigger mistakes. And with a conclusion like that, Friends with Kids is a somewhat unsettling look at people’s desperate attempts to find happiness as they feel their biological clocks ticking away.

Friends with Kids. Written and directed by Jennifer Westfeldt. Starring Jennifer Westfeldt, Adam Scott, Kristen Wiig, John Hamm, Maya Rudoph, Chris O’Dowd, Megan Fox and Edward Burns. Rated R. www.friendswithkids.com.