I recently made a deal with my girlfriend, and that deal was that I had to watch a chick movie of her choosing with her. It’s only fair, seeing as I made her sit through Cloverfield, Sin City, Saw, and sometime in the near future, Iron Man. It’s not a bad trade, all in all, because now I can probably make it halfway through the NFL season watching only sports and ultraviolent dude movies with her. Last night, though, in accordance with our agreement, I had to watch P.S. I Love You.

While I will admit that it was not bad as far as films go, and I even found it fairly enjyoable, it was possibly the greatest chick flick of all time. I don’t mean great as in “the most appealing to a wide variety of audiences.” I mean great in that P.S. I Love You is more effective at eliciting the desired emotional response from women than any other chick flick in history, which of course is hysterical bouts of sobbing.
Anyone that has seen it knows that film was meticulously engineered to make women cry from beginning to end. It had all the elements that girls go nuts over: a love story, the death of a loved one, and a hot Irish guy who plays the guitar. I bet most girls reading this right now are tearing up just thinking about it.

These movies are bad for a man’s self-image. I might even argue that they are bad for everyone’s self image. They set unrealistic standards for over the top romance that are more or less impossible to meet. Guys are made to feel like their romantic notions aren’t good enough, and girls are made to feel like their guys aren’t good enough either. We all get duped into believing that there are actually people out there that do this stuff. In P.S. I Love You, the freaking guy writes letters from beyond the grave guiding his widow through the grief process and ultimately freeing her to fall in love again. Not to mention he keeps showing up shirtless in her apartment and playing her Irish love songs. Are you kidding me? My wife will be lucky if I leave her the toaster oven and my old shoes when I die.

I get the feeling that a lot of girls grow up thinking that their first kiss will be on a snow spotted mountain top overlooking the ocean, or that their true love will chase them halfway across the world and propose at the base of the Eiffel Tower or something. Maybe for some people that’s how it happens; and then those people have books written about them, and someone makes movies out of those books, and all of the sudden my suggestions for a quiet dinner at Olive Garden just looks like lazy mediocrity. Now what am I supposed to do with my gift card?

It’s not that I don’t believe in romance; I definitely do. To me, romance is putting on nice clothes and going to a dinner you can’t afford, or still kissing someone even though they have a nasty cold, or watching ridiculous movies like P.S. I Love You because it will make the other person happy. That’s real romance… but, admittedly, it would make an awful movie.