Flourish, Old Maid, Happiness Awaits

Flourish, Old Maid, Happiness Awaits
The Valentine's Day Old Maid Movie Marathon

Alone this Valentine's Day? A bit blue about it? Here's the best way to occupy your mind: see into your fabulous future.

Sometimes the best guy comes to those who wait.

Here is a list of movies for your Valentine's Day Old Maid Movie Marathon: The Quiet Man, The African Queen, Now, Voyager, All of Me, Desk Set, The Music Man, Brigadoon, The Long, Hot Summer.

In these movies, the good girl is alone for a long stretch of time, pitied by all because of her man-less state. In these movies, the (for the most part) greatest guy ever does come along, and she gets a happy ending, happier, probably than the ending found by girls who married just to be married just because everybody else was getting married.

Statistically, really, most people do eventually get married -- do find true love. It's almost certainly your destiny. Would your lonely nights be less awful if you knew that you were to wind up with Paul Newman, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart? Well, you almost certainly will.

Watch as many of these movies as you can find during the Valentine's Day weekend - get a group together.

And get busy and get everything done now -- all your projects -- because husbands take up a lot of time.

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.

Four Wrong Things You Can Do With Your Intuition

Let's establish when not to pay attention to what our inner voice is telling us.

The Four Wrong Things You Can Do With Your Intuition

Non-newbies know several things about intuition - but only because they messed up and figured it out later. There are four main dangers about intuition:

1. He is Undiscovered Treasure. You cannot rely on your intuition that although he seems to be a bad guy, although everybody you know who's not in love with him thinks that his character is completely awful and that he's a danger to you, you can trust what your heart is saying - that he's actually a wonderful guy who, with your love and help, will make all your own dreams come true. It never happens except in the movies.

2. Your love is so great, though instantaneous, that you are reading all his thoughts, and he is reading all yours. This also never happens except in the movies. A great example of this is in the classic Letter from An Unknown Woman, where Joan Fontaine throws her life away because what she thought was magic was actually a skillfully constructed seduction con.

3. Pretend it’s intuition when it’s actually desperation. So here's where I reveal a secret about us girls: sometimes we pretend to ourselves that passion just flat out overcame us, just like Jennifer Jones saying no and no and actually slashing Gregory Peck's cheeks with our fingernails in our earnest desire to keep ahold of our virtue except that passion overrules us and it's not our fault. (Duel in the Sun -- one of the worst movies of all time; one of the most watchable worst movies of all time.)

But we aren't really giving in to a wave of passion, we're making a conscious choice to cast ourselves into the abyss because we're bored or we're troubled, we’re afraid we’ll be alone forever, and we hope that maybe something wonderful might come out of abyss-casting through sheer dumb luck. But we say it was just one of those excitement of the moment things; we say we're trusting our intuition.

4. "She sounds like that voice inside your head that tells you you can't do anything." (Fom Postcards from the Edge' -- she's referring to her grandmother) Everybody hears this voice occasionally, even Meryl Streep, who says it in the movie and Carrie Fisher, who wrote it. It's nothing to worry about; it's something that will pass if you’re calm. [Can't wait? Get Postcards from the Edge now at iTunes: ]







Keep Reading!

Buy Letter From An Unknown Woman now - learn how to resist a seduction:

Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe

Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe.

No, not the actors, God bless them and grant them a measure of privacy, the characters they played in Cruel Intentions. Reese played a sweet virgin, and Ryan played the bad guy who pretended to be a good guy to get her into bed but accidentally fell in love with her, and suffice it to say, it does not end well.

We talked before that the three variables to work out in finding whether it’s true love start with Character – yours and his – and now we’re at:

(b) His character.

I know you don't believe me -- yet -- but whether your lover has a fine, upstanding character will not only provide gargantuan clues as to the authenticity of his love, but it will eventually determine if he completes your life or wrecks it beyond repair.



In Cruel Intentions, Ryan plans to pretend to love her just long enough – all the pretty things he says are lies. This is a common pattern in movies: (and in life, dear)

In Pillow Talk, a movie where Doris Day is exactly like you even though she’s a fictional ‘60’s character, Rock Hudson poses as Rex Stetson, tourist from Texas, polite, chivalrous and true. He says in a voiceover, “I’d say, five, or six dates ought to do it.” He has to pretend, because he knows she already knows he's an unapologetic jerk who wouldn’t get past an opening line if she knew his real name.



These guys can’t keep up the charade forever, though, which will take us to our second variable, Time.


Can't wait? Get Cruel Intentions now at iTunes!

3 Variables of True Love

Discerning the difference between love and lust involves paying close attention to three principal variables: character, time, and intuition.

1. Character - Yours and His

The Keira Knightly Pride and Prejudice version got a lot of things right, but they left out this very important line from the book:

Elizabeth: To be sure, you knew no actual good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.

Basic Rule: if either yours or his is seriously flawed or completely absent, the relationship will not ultimately work, even (and this is the hard part) even if there is actually real love. There are no known exceptions to this rule.

(a) Your character. Do you have any?

There's a reason we’re starting with How To Tell if It’s True Love and not "What are the better entrapment techniques?" It's because I presume that you're interested in a relationship that lasts a lifetime, a happy and integral complement to your already rich and interesting life.



In another Jane Austen-based film, Sense and Sensibility, Kate Winslet falls for a man no character, and he breaks her heart, luckily before she marries him and he destroys her life and reputation as well. Marianne threw caution to the winds when falling in love with Willoughby, disregarding then-existing rules of social conduct. Unquestionably, Willoughby loved her, but his nefarious deeds and general selfishness of character made lasting love impossible.

There's a period of time in the storyline of the sisters where both feel they've been dumped, but Emma Thompson at least has the comfort that she didn't fall in love with a jerk.

Ironically, while Marianne thought she was finding wild romance with Willoughby and that Colonel Brandon was boring, she eventually found that Colonel Brandon was a wildly romantic creature with a tragic love in his past.

Meanwhile, watch the storyline of Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant -- Hugh Grant makes the difficult decisions to honor his commitments and do the right thing, and everything works out for them.

Can't wait? Get Sense and Sensibility now at iTunes:

Keep Reading!

Aunt Lee Says: Everybody will be on Netflix eventually -- why not start today?

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!