I Can’t Believe You Didn’t Know It Was A Line!

I Can’t Believe You Didn’t Know It Was A Line!

In the very first episode of “Friends,” Monica falls for a seduction line and doesn’t even realize it until Joey and Ross explain it to her. (Refresh your memory - download it now:

It’s a sad, sad thing that this line continues to work when it's been excruciatingly well documented in movies (the best examples are in Some Like It Hot and Pillow Talk). Monica fell, but you won’t have to, if you follow this blog.

Seduction Con Lines

Luckily for us, even after centuries of guys desperately pooling resources and stealing seduction ideas from books and movies and each other, the lines they come up with are pretty predictable.

Seduction Con Lines will generally fall into three basic, easily recognizable categories, with subcategories as plentiful as the desperation that drives them, along with one scheme that never, ever works on us but that two subgroups of sub-men, with blindingly hilarious stupidity continually believe will work someday. Plus the one seduction con that’s been working pretty effectively since about 1960.

We’ll get to all them.

But as a preview, Monica fell for what has to be called the “Some Like It Hot” seduction – Marilyn Monroe, alone with Tony Curtis on a yacht, is on her guard against being seduced. But Curtis pretends to be – shall we say, “harmless,” moving Marilyn to take on his harmlessness as her personal fix-it project, plying him with champagne and kisses to get him, shall we say, up to speed.

Doris Day falls for the very same seduction con in Pillow Talk, which we’ll get to in some detail and again in Lover Come Back.

Stay with me, and you’ll soon know every seduction technique, plus the effective counter-measures.

The Idea of Him & Safely Married

If you let it, The Idea Of Him can be a dark force that nudges us into relationships that, like the Sally & Joe relationship in When Harry Met Sally, may not be really traumatizingly bad for us, but are serving only as placeholders and that are wasting everyone’s time.

See, Sally thinks she’s in a “Man Who Can’t Commit” relationship – they talk it out, and that’s as far as he can go. But what she was really in was a Man Who Refuses to Settle for a Safe Marriage relationship.

When Joe actually met the girl he wound up marrying, it happened fast; what’s difficult for us as women to wrap our minds around is, this is not an insult to Sally. Sally’s a bit Type-A; she’s wracked with remorse – if she had been lower maintenance, Joe would have married her, blah blah blah. Almost unconsciously, she sees it all as a competition that she lost.

Joe is the hero here. Well, and Sally. But especially Nora Ephron – she’s conceding a fault of smart women, but it’s a concession better to face and move forward – a certain percentage of these Men Who Can’t Commit relationship scenarios are actually Women Who Want To Have Been Right. With strong hints of I Don’t Want To Have To Start Over.

Women do this all the time, and in recent decades women have wasted the universe’s time with piteous appeals that men are soul-less and fickle, and it’s pretty dadgum brave of Nora to admit that sometimes girls are just in a hurry and that the boy was right to sideswipe Safely Married and hold out for Gloriously Married.

Keep following this blog, and we’ll get you Gloriously Married.

Post-Valentine's Day and The Idea of Him

The Idea of Him

In When Harry Met Sally, the title characters are discussing their ex’s, and Sally confesses that she doesn’t really miss “him”,

Sally: You know what I miss? I miss the idea of him.

The Idea of Him is a powerful force in our lives – the notion that we’ll have a date on national holidays, that we’ve succeeded, somehow.

If you’re not in a relationship, it’s possible that Valentine’s Day was difficult for you, not – almost certainly not -- because you are actually lonely, but because the notion of The Idea of Him floats in the ether, almost requiring you to feel unhappy if He’s not in your life.

Stripped of all the emotion, it’s almost a comical force.

Sally’s best friend, Princess Leia, well, anyway, Carrie Fisher, illustrates for us the absurdity of letting The Idea of Him rule our lives. She stays in a pathetic, semi, in reality just being used relationship with a married man; she keeps a Rolodex of available single men; despite the face that she has a great job and great friends, she makes herself frantic and unhappy for years. Then she meets the right guy, when it’s the right time for both of them, and everything falls into place, and she’s wasted an insane amount of time and energy, but you don’t have to.

So, we’ve got Jane Austen giving you the advice not to be in a hurry; we’ve got Nora Ephron giving you the advice not to be in a hurry; we’ve got Aunt Lee giving you the advice not to be in a hurry – it’s something to keep in mind.

Note – we’re eventually going to be spending a lot of time with When Harry Met Sally; you’ll want to consider buying the screenplay, which will make it easier to keep up and will get you acquainted with screenplay formatting, because I’m going to convince you to write your own.




Next, The Idea of Him and Safely Married.

He's Just Not That Into You - Now Do You Believe Me?

See -- there is a lot to be learned from watching and absorbing what happens in movies.

One very helpful principle that somehow didn't make it into the Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice was this exchange:

Mrs. Gardiner: "You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in love merely because you are warned against it; and, therefore, I am not afraid of speaking openly. Seriously, I would have you be on your guard...."

Lizzy: "All that I can promise you, therefore, is not to be in a hurry. I will not be in a hurry to believe myself his first object. When I am in company with him, I will not be wishing. In short, I will do my best."

So, consider -- if the characters in this new movie would merely heed this very basic advice -- don't be in a hurry -- think how much misery would be avoided.

Remember the Second Variable in finding true love is time. There's plenty of time. Almost certainly, you won't be single as long as I was, and I survived; it's better to wait and get it right. And while you're waiting, watch gobs of movies.

Love's Dozen - The Next Six

We're learning about men and love from movies -- catch up on the first set of required viewing.

Remember, my advice from the situations in these movies will be life-changing, but to get the full benefit you'll actually need to watch the movies. It's one thing to read in black and white about how Katharine Hepburne wastes her time with a man ridiculously unworthy of her in Desk Set; it's quite another to experience it all along with her.




Philadelphia Story – intuition and magic and character and time and what women want to hear from men;
When Harry Met Sally – men who can’t commit, framework for making sexual decisions, sex for non-sexual reasons, female screenwriters;
Postcards from the Edge – truth about playboys, female screenwriters, The Rush, seduction;

Pat and Mike – character, safely married vs. gloriously married;
Holiday – Love’s Hinckeys, The Peanut Speech of True Love;
Desk Set – men who can’t commit, magic, gloriously married;
To Have and Have Not – intuition, character, gloriously married.

Baker's Dozen - Born Yesterday - Abusive Relationships

Before long, you’ll not only know lots about true love but lots about classic movies – heaven knows you’ve wasted gargantuan moments watching awful movies – pay attention - there will be quizzes.

Aunt Lee Says: Everyone will be on Netflix eventually -- why not start now?

Love's Dozen - The Most Important Movies for Understanding Men

Honestly, you can learn everything you need to know about negotiating your path to true love from old movies. To get the full benefit from my advice, you'll hafta actually watch the movies -- half the point of the process is that you experience what the character experiences.

Follow this blog, and you’ll eventually learn about dozens of movies, but you should at least know in some depth the top twelve. Here's the first set; I've provided convenient clickables to get the movies from Amazon or, when available, straight to your iPod from iTunes:





Pillow Talk – playboys and seduction;
Rear Window – men who can’t commit;
Where The Boys Are (1960)– seduction – character and time love factors, The Get Scale, and the most important modern seduction technique;
Roxanne – seduction and what women want to hear from men, why we really love men, and Gloriously Married;

Way Down East / Fast Times at Ridgemont High (they’re really the same movie) – seduction and youth and sex and playboys and true love;

Before long, you’ll not only know lots about true love but lots about classic movies – heaven knows you’ve wasted gargantuan moments watching awful movies – pay attention - there will be quizzes.

Keep Reading --

Everybody will be on Netflix someday -- why not start today?



On to the next set:

Hollywood Dweeb Fallacy II: Marriage is a Mutual Trophy Acquisition Procedure

The Hollywood Dweeb Marital Fallacy II:

Marriage is a Mutual Trophy Acquisition Procedure

In Hollywood, in Hollywood movies, in Junior High, the object of relationships is to show off, and personal happiness is a remote secondary issue.

Take Brittany Murphy’s character, Tai, in Clueless (still the best film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel). She actually really likes stoner dude Travis but is talked into liking Elton, higher on the social ladder but really kinda empty and soul-less and boring. (In the novel Emma, Harriet actually loves a cute farmer boy, but Emma talks her into loving the vicar, Mr. Elton). The Tai/Harriet character lets herself be persuaded that she can “get” someone higher on the social scale but is never really happy; she just thinks she should be happy.

Remember the three love factors: Character, Time, and Intuition. Ambition’s not there anywhere, is it? For fun, go through the three factors with the Cher/Emma character and Josh/Mr. Knightly – see the difference? She’s known him long enough to establish his true character, which is fine; and although intuition hits late, it hits hard: bingo – True Love.


"He could have anybody, and he wants me" is not the central issue of a love affair, at least outside junior high or Hollywood, although it always seems as if it should be. It probably has seeped into your brain – shake it off.

If you can't wait to catch up, get Clueless at iTunes now:



Type A Girls: Get the Emma audiobook now from iTunes:

The Hollywood Dweeb Marital Fallacy I: An Offer of Marriage Instantaneously Rights All Wrongs.

We’re going to look at ways that movies-into-brain-seeping can mess us up. Here’s:

The Hollywood Dweeb Marital Fallacy I: An Offer of Marriage Instantaneously Rights All Wrongs.

It's the wicked stepsister of "Love Conquers All". It's revisionist history at its most insidious. It's hooked a lot of fine women up to men who don't really deserve them. It's the pinnacle of crazed fantasy which precedes the raging abyss of marital property division and child support enforcement.

It's the standard romantic comedy denouement, so ingrained in our unconscious that it's startling to realize we really don't believe it in our rational selves.

If I'm too late and you actually believe the fallacy, ask any two hundred married women -- they will assure you quickly that marriage hardly erases a man's faults.

We’re going to talk at length about playboys in movies, those perennial non-committers, as we go, but for now, know that Pillow Talk represents the standard – a gorgeous, cool guy sleeps around with everyone on the planet and then accidentally falls in love with an intended conquest.

Somehow, in Pillow Talk, nobody ever stops to wonder how Doris, who fell in love with chaste, polite, chivalrous Rex Stetson is going to be happy married to rude, selfish womanizer Brad Allen. But I want you to.

And nobody really worries about Gwyneth Paltrow – we all just assume that Iron Man and playboy Robert Downey, Jr. would give up all the bimbos if he made a commitment to her. But I want you to.

This Hollywood Dweeb Marital Fallacy should have no place in your own decisions about making lifelong commitments. All I'm saying is watch for it. It's the basis for almost all Hollywood happy endings and almost no real life ones.

Learn about the Hollywood Dweeb Marital Fallacy II.

If you can't wait, get Iron Man at iTunes now:

Movies-into-Brain-Seeping

As modern women, our romantic lives are sort-of prescripted by what we've seen people in the movies do. We see movie people in all kinds of private moments where we never see friends and neighbors, and we incorporate a huge movie-character database into negotiations of our own love lives. It's inevitable.

As we all know, movies have their conventions: Boy meets, gets girl, misunderstanding, happy ending. Unhappily, romantic movie conventions have the tendency to seep into our unconscious, motivating us to follow, neither our hearts nor our minds, but our dim memories of what Julia Roberts said to Richard Gere.

When the creative minds from whence our movies flow are sensible, intelligent and humorous, movies-into-brain-seeping works in our favor.

When the creative minds from whence our movies flow are dweebish, heedless of history, psychologically uninformed,self-involved, and shallow, as is very often the case, we can still benefit - we can gain helpful insights of how powerful and
shallow people would produce a world; we can learn by negative example.

Thumbs up or down, movie worlds afford us the accumulated romantic experience of lifetimes of very intelligent people, male and female, on specific guy-related issues we face every day of our lives.

If we only knew where to look.