The "Get Scale"

Follow this blog, and you’ll learn all you need to know to triumph in love.

With the starter question, “Does He Like Me?” you must first understand The Get Scale. Who can "get" who?

This is the Fifth Couple – at about 2:50 minutes into the clip:

From When Harry Met Sally:
FIFTH WOMAN: He was the head counselor at the boys' camp, and I was the head counselor at the girls' camp. They had a social one night. (beat) And he walked across the room. I thought he was coming to talk to my friend Maxine, because people were always walking across rooms to talk to Maxine, but he was coming to talk to me.




Here's where power issues meet with sexual awakening - we've been aware that power and status and sex were all linked together since any of those items first come upon our consciousness - could we get the best looking guy in the class? a football player? a yearbook editor? First, second, third bad boy? Will people always walk across rooms to talk to us?

Please don't misunderstand me -- when I refer to The Get Scale, I do not mean the scale of real character and quality - just the perception -- basically the mathematical equivalent of The Hollywood Dweeb Marital Fallacy II - Marriage is a Mutual Trophy Acquisition Procedure.

It's still important to understand, tho - so you don't have an experience like Martha Dumptruck does in Heathers - about 1:50 minutes into this clip:


The Bad Heathers wrote a love note from the "cool" football star to the unattractive girl - and because she didn't understand everybody's ranking on The Get Scale, Martha, the unattractive girl, had a very bad day.

The Get Scale isn't the real measure of a person's actual value, but it is important to understand how it works if you are going to safely negotiate your own love life. Next - Get Scale Inequities.

I'll be referring to both these movies a lot, so go ahead and buy the Movies Now:
Also buy Nora Ephron's screenplay:




Netflix, Inc.

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.

Is It True Love?

In When Harry Met Sally, Joe says it and does't really mean it, although he thinks he does. In About Last Night, Rob Lowe says it and means it, although he doesn't realize he does. In Rio Bravo, John Wayne doesn't say it, he says "You go out like that and I'll arrest you", but he means, I Love You, and Angie Dickinson knows it.

In Where The Boys Are, Dolores Hart says, "Unless you love me the way I love you..." and George Hamilton says, "I love you!" which you can see for yourself in the trailer for the movie:



They think that "I love you" is their trump card, the phrase that will invariably grant them entrance into our souls and bodies. And it sort of is. But how can you tell if the love they're offering is real, or if you are merely a conquest to them? Is it possible at all?

In 1959, Doris Day was able to make this distinction when rogue Rock Hudson actually proposed marriage, but those were more hopeful times. By the sixties, in Where the Boys Are, Yvette Mimieux seems to believe in a convoluted scheme in which the fact that a real Ivy League Boy actually shows up in her life and wants to sleep with her indicates true love. In the late seventies, I thought you could tell it was true love if his eyes actually, literally sparkled.

Since this is the basic question in all romantic relationships,I can't answer it completely here. Okay, I can't answer it completely anywhere, ever, and I don't have easy answers, either, like the sparkly eyes thing I personally had such high hopes for. Mostly, all I can do is to help point out the questions you should be asking yourself.

Keep reading and find out how to find your true love.


Can't wait to get started? Get When Harry Met Sally at iTunes now!