Director Christian Ditter will be the first to admit that being single isn’t easy—especially with Hollywood shoving an endless loop of heteronormative, altar-driven happy endings down our throats.

“Most films tell you, particularly if you’re female, that you have to find a guy that completes you,” he says in a call to the Straight from Los Angeles. “And I think that’s bullshit because you can complete yourself and then find someone. And you’re gonna be a lot more chill along the way.”

It’s this formative trajectory that Ditter explores in How to Be Single, opening Friday (February 12), which follows four (mostly) 20-something women—and a few misguided men—as they navigate the fraught and ever-shifting intricacies of singlehood in New York City.

The anti–Valentine’s Day flick is the second romantic comedy by the German-born director, who made his stateside debut with the amiable Love, Rosie. Both films are silver-screen adaptations of best-selling novels; however, the similarities pretty much end there as How to Be Single trades melancholy regret and tearful confessions of adolescent love for lighter, decidedly raunchier fare that comes courtesy of, for the most part, Rebel Wilson.

“Some of the funniest things you’ll see on the big screen are things that Rebel made up on the get-go,” reveals Ditter. “You can differentiate between what was scripted and what was improv’d because the camera would start shaking a little bit. People weren’t expecting it and the camera operator would start to laugh.”

Wilson plays Robin, the loudmouth colleague of Dakota Johnson’s inexperienced and rather mousy Alice. Unlike Alice, who’s recently broken up with her college beau in an effort to “find herself”, Robin is a single skilled in the art of hit-it-and-quit-it seduction, making for an amusing rapport—and a series of bleary-eyed benders—that should trigger flashbacks in anyone who’s ever been young, dumb, and very, very drunk.

Subplots are offered by Alison Brie as the hyper-acute but hopeful Lucy, who’s devised a set of complex algorithms to snag a suitor online, and Leslie Mann, who portrays Alice’s jaded, too-busy-for-a-boyfriend obstetrician sister, Meg. A slew of love interests are most memorably played by Anders Holm, Jake Lacy, and a wacky Jason Mantzoukas, though you may be surprised by who does and doesn’t end up with whom.

“There’s a lot of ways to be happy, and it doesn’t have to be by finding a romantic relationship,” says Ditter. “It could be finding a relationship with a friend or with a sibling or with yourself. Romantic relationships are part of our lives, but it’s not all it’s about.”

That’s not to say that you have to be rolling solo to enjoy this ride, either. After all, next to the damning conundrums of love, How to Be Single tackles a glaringly familiar theme that boasts an equally vast, if not even wider, audience.

“I think it’s a very relevant topic for anyone who is single right now,” Ditter adds, “but also for anybody who has ever been single, which is, you know, everybody.”