We all know that Kate Hudson is on a mission to find out how many multiplexes she has to stink up before studios will stop paying her to do it--perhaps in some kind of ultimate homage to her mother, the star of Protocol, Wildcats, and Overboard--but did you know that she's also destroying your chance for romantic happiness? It's true! Scottish researchers have concluded an enquiry into effect of exposure to the cliches of formula romantic comedies, and the results are not encouraging. "We have this idea," says psychologist Bjarne M. Holmes, "that out of six-and-a-half billion people, we're somehow going to meet our predestined soul mate, who happens to live in the same neighborhood or work in the same place. I love how that always happens." (If this were a romantic comedy, Dr. Holmes would be the wisecracking best friend played by Joan Cusack. Tip your hat.) The Los Angeles Times reports that "In the study, recently published in the journal Communication Quarterly, Holmes and fellow researcher Kimberly Johnson selected 40 top-grossing romantic comedies released from 1995 to 2005 -- including such titles as What Women Want and You've Got Mail -- and analyzed their content, cataloging each scene of romantic action such as gift-giving, kissing, declarations of love, weddings, involvement with exes and even acts of deception in the pursuit of love."

In the process, they seemed to find "a correlation between the preference for such entertainments and the students' curdled concepts about love." People who watch enough of the things seemed to take as gospel some of the more dubious "messages" that are repeated over and over in movie after movie: the "predestined soul mate" concept; the always helpful idea that the strongest relationships are those built on lies and deception, and even that these relationships, after a brief spell of soul-searching, will only grow back stronger after your loved one discovers that you understand him so well because you've been reading his mail and also that you're now really the long-lost Princess Anastasia; the clinically idiotic concept that your partner should be able to divine your deepest thoughts through some kind of lover's ESP, which means that your relationship would be sullied if you stooped to actual, straightfroward communication; the inexplicably popular notion that men and women are totally different species and that the secret of romantic success is to crack the gender-based code of behavior that governs each of us. (This last one has apparently gotten a big boost from He's Just Not That Into You, despite the fact that it is universal knowledge that anything that comes out of Justin Long's mouth has got to be horseshit.) Researchers also failed to find a single successful marriage that involved an incident of one partner blurting out a lengthy declaration of undying love to the other in full view of a bemused crowd while breaking up their wedding to an unamused third party or after a mad chase to the airport.

Film critic David Thomson agrees that the researchers are onto something more than a cute conceit here. "How can we not assume that the works we produce for ourselves, the stories we tell each other, are going to affect us in some way? I grew up thinking you really have to fall in love with someone and marry them and it will last forever and you'll be happy. None of these things is true. I think the comedies of the '30s and '40s, some of them stand up among our best films. But there was a kind of code of family life that has probably been very destructive because it's left a lot of people feeling, 'My family didn't work out that way.' It's a lot to live up to." The question that remains is whether people imitate these patterns because they've seen them in movies--and, says Holmes, "The average American sees more examples of relationships in popular media than in their own lives"--or if the movie cliches grew out of common preconceptions that people already had and that they wanted to hear restated again and again when they were being entertained. Whichever is the case, the movies pound these half-baked ideas that much harder into people's brains, with long-term unfortunate consquences; as Holmes sees it, "people sometimes spend ten years going through a series of relationships that, if they had put time and energy into, might have actually gone somewhere instead of having this prior idea of what they're expecting." Arguing otherwise is Laurie Puhn, author of Instant Persuasion: How to Change Your Words to Change Your Life, who argues that her clients are actually less thick than they may appear. "What I find about people who come in for family mediation is that they're not deluded; they don't think, 'He should be able to read my mind.' They just don't know how to express what they're thinking." But if they don't know how to express what they're thinking, how do you know they're not thinking that their partners should be able to read their minds? Huh!? Thanks for playing!