You echo what I tell all my couples in the office. They don’t get it- men or women. You see, the rom-coms are just redux of the old fairy tales- nothing new. However, the modern person thinks they have “gotten over” the belief that fairy tales are true.

They haven’t- they’ve just traded them in for funny flickers on a screen. And it does lead to unrealistic expectations and lots of heartache.

That is why I have a great practice working with couples.

Thanks for the interesting post!

If he talks to his private part while taking a leak in the men’s room, that is what I’m talking about. Men don’t do that. If he says “I pushed you away because you got too close,” that too is what I’m talking about. There is no occasion in real life that would prompt a man to say something like this, and I do mean ANY kind of man, not just the kind of man who meets with my approval. It is psychobabble written by some Hollywood hippy born between 1939 and 1955 who has a bald spot and a ponytail and wears sandals over socks. Men do not ‘fess up about having a fear of commitment. They do not offer up polished psychological diagnoses about themselves carefully retracing all the coarse and crude non-new-age things their parents did to them when they were babies, and this is why he compares all his girlfriends to his mother or his first “true love” or his dead wife.

I realize this is just character development. Well you know the right way to develop a character? The way Ian Fleming did it in the James Bond novels…minus that dry, tedious monologue in Casino Royale to Rene Mathes from the hospital bed. You drop clues, and let the audience put the clues together. You don’t work it into the dialogue!

You know why they do it that way?

Because fans of romantic comedy, generally speaking, just aren’t very perceptive, imaginative or bright. At least, not while they’re watching. If they have the mental faculties needed to figure out mysteries like this, they just don’t wanna use ‘em. So there’s no mystery. No suspense. Your only suspense is “Will they end up together??” And to the masculine mind, if all possibilities have been eliminated save one, that means there is no suspense. We’re problem solvers by nature and we don’t care to take two hours to solve a puzzle that can be solved in two minutes.

Oze:

“Ben Stiller basically tells his about-to-be-wife to get lost because she had sex with the scuba instructor on their honeymoon.”

How does one have a honeymoon with one’s about-to-be-wife?

Great line, and one that needed to be said.

Let me explain, a guy that loves to blow money, drives an expensive car, has all of the other girls swooning around him is a lot of fun to date.

Fast forward five years, you are now married. He is still blowing money. He still loves having other women swoon over him and driving a car he can’t afford. This is a definition of hell for any woman.
You’re broke from his bad money management. You never know if he’s screwing some of those other women. Sure some men will shift gears after getting married and become those perfect husbands you see in the movies.

But reality proves that the things that you dislike in a dating partner do NOT go away when you get married. No, they just get amplified.

I would love to see a rom-com where the girl picks the boring intelligent man over the flashy stud.
I have often wondered how many women are out there kicking themselves in the butt for not giving that skinny, ugly Bill Gates a “sympathy” date before he became rich.

You have mirrored one of my basic philisophical and psycological talking points.

relationship romance is, (when boiled down to its most elemental components), Ponography for Women.

What is Ponography:

Steve Davis’s definition of Ponography:

That which immediatly sexually stimulates (visually or emotionally) with low effort for high return, and which if pursued exclusivly in a normal relationship would have a high probability of destroying that relationship.

So yes I think the Supreme court Justice who spoke on this subject needs more judicial Philisophical education.

Pure. Gold. Awesomeness. That has to be one of the funniest things I have read in a blog in a while. I laughed my ass off at work when I saw this.

In all seriousness, yes I think most of what you say is true. Like I’ve said before, wait until the Millenials get mostly into the marriageable age bracket (assuming they even get married) and you’re going to see problems like what you described by the bucketload.