So you decided to kick your feet up and watch a little TV this weekend.  Chances are, you couldn’t push a button without bumping head on into some sappy love story, likely featuring either Meg Ryan, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Hudson, or Julia Roberts.  Even if you did find the one channel playing something else, your commercials were tainted with The Vow or This Means War commercials, both upcoming chick flicks.  It’s the season of love!  The weekend before Valentine’s Day!  Everyone needs to be in the mood for swooning, and nothing says swoon like Hugh Grant, the unattractive funny guy, awkwardly winning a girl over with his quirky charm.  Well, for girls anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love myself a good chick flick.  Love Actually is one of my favorite movies and I went through a “sad” phase of my life where I watched it every night as I went to sleep.  Even last night I had a fun girl’s night going to see The Vow.  The one thing that I can’t seem to shake from every overly saccharinated movie I have seen is the completely false expectation that it puts in our heads for all the poor dopey men out there (I say dopey as a term of endearment.  Stick with me, I’ll get there).  Channing Tatum’s character, for example,  knew all the right words to say and the best way to handle an impossibly frustrating situation.  He showed strength when it was required and cried at the times that he needed to be vulnerable and sensitive.  Then, before the credits, it shows this picture of this lovely “happily ever after” family that the film was based on.  That means it is all true, obviously.

The truth is, men don’t have a clue what romantic little thing we need to hear at that pivotal moment when we are standing in the rain, waiting for a heartfelt confession.  I dated a guy for years who always managed to say the exact thing I didn’t want to hear at the moment I wanted to hear something wonderful.  In his mind, he was doing the best he possibly could to say the right thing.  We both were horrible at actually articulating our feelings as it was, a part of our relationship where we were oddly compatible and incompatible at the same time.  However, if I was in “chick flick” mode, it was never the right thing.  Through years of getting to know him, I learned to appreciate the little things he would say that would be golden, or the strange songs he would say reminded him of me because literally one line or phrase resonated with him, while the rest of the song was completely wrong and could easily be taken as offensive.  (EX: Stop This Train by John Mayer.  The whole song is about how he doesn’t want to grow up and life is moving too fast.  John shows extreme immaturity in this song, and our difference in maturity was always a hot spot.  However, there is one line that says, “Once in a while, when it’s good, It’ll feel like it should.”  THAT is the part I was supposed to be listening to, and it wasn’t until my feathers were already pretty rustled that he told me it was that one. little. tiny. line.)  Men in real life do not have writers sitting there feeding them these great, iconic lines like “Here’s looking at you, kid!”  They have to do the best they can to think outside of their own realm of emotions and think, what, exactly, does this dame want me to say!  Some become very smooth over time, but it just isn’t natural for the majority of men.  Yet, for some unknown reason, even though I have seen this with friends and with relationships in my own life, women, including myself, get this little ache inside, yearning for that romantic moment where the man says exactly what is in the contents of her head when they watch that chick flick.

So this is what I propose to fix this problem.  Men really need to watch more chick flicks and women need to watch less.  Yesterday, a couple of my little brother’s friends went to see The Vow together, both male, and posted on Facebook about this activity.  Several girls  “liked” that activity, while other guys razzed them.  These boys are actually quite wise.  First of all, they are going to run in to several single girls at a movie like that on a Saturday afternoon.  Second of all, they are going to actually be fully immersed in the fantasy.  Every chick flick is built on the same fantasy, which is: girl with all her quirks, whether self inflicted or inflicted by others, finds a man who loves her perfectly for all of those quirks, says all the right things at the right times, and TA DA!  It ends happily ever after.  By these boys learning the fantasy, they actually have an ace in the hole when they are faced with girls who are wanting just that.  Whether or not they understand the strange and wacky behaviors of the girl they are interested in, by carefully studying the output of men in chick flicks, they will know the correct response to said behaviors.  It’s that simple.  Women, on the other hand, really should watch about anything other than chick flicks unless they can watch them with complete cynicism.  Poor guys really don’t stand a chance against the perfectly dressed, sculpted, and scripted men in our fantasy movies.  Then, maybe just learn how to love the dopey, yet cute things the real men are actually saying and doing.  It’s much more romantic for a guy to be himself than to be some perfect poster child anyways.  (See!  I can stand up for men, too!)