Dear Illegal Ninja,
My girl is really into chick flicks. How do I avoid getting dragged into watching them?
Emotionally Castrated,
NY, NY
Dear Emotionally,
Here's the plot for a chick flick I've been contracted to write. I haven't nailed down the details yet, but there's this guy and a girl that are single, wildly beautiful, and one of them is extremely successful in his/her career and the other is outclassed. They both work in fields related to relationships. One of them writes about relationships (possibly at a newpaper). While the other one either sets people up or plans the weddings.
Irony seeps in when we realize they're able to analyze everyone elses relationships while their own social lives are an unmitigated train wreck, mostly because she's so uptight that she's afraid of commitment and he's such a shoot from the hip renegade that he's also afraid of commitment. Commical sideplots develope when both of the couples roomates/cube mates who are socially spastic, alternatley push them together and pull them apart. Hilarity ensues when the writer publishes against his/her will something that exposes the truth of the relationship and one of them appears to have been using the other one which is followed by publicly anouncing the others secrets. Then they get over it and make out.
The title is How to Runaway from your Best Friend's Thirty Dresses In New York Without a Hitch Hill. This will apear on the markee as "Hill."
Make no mistake, refusing to go to a chick flick sends the meta message that you want your romance to wither and die. Remember she has the power to make other things in your life wither and die.
The key here is to tune into your highly developed skills of Ninja subtrifuge. Laugh at the one line quips that make the movie almost bearable. When your woman asks," See I said you would like it, wasn't that awesome?" What she will really mean is, "Does one shred of romance exist in your soul, or should I rely on episodes of the Bachelor as my only glimps into the world of unrealistic romance. This question is of the "Do these pants make me look fat" genre, where any answer is wrong including explaining that the question is a trap from which there is no escape.
The only option is to disarm the main blast and deal with the collateral damage. Say," I really liked that part where..." Eventually everyone breaks and admits that watching the movie felt like Slash pulled your eye ball out of socket and played "Welcome to the Jungle" with your optic nerve using a jelly fish for the guitar pick. Because you communicated that you liked some snippets of the movie, she will hold a grain of hope that you have vestiges of romance, which will buy you enough time to present her with flowers, at which point she will transfer some of the fake emotions from the movie to your relationship and with luck your relationship account will only be a few emotional credits more overdrawn than before she trapped you into seeing the movie.
Life has become a lot easier for me since I learned that women are a lot like the internet. They aren't trucks that you just dump stuff on, they're more like a series of tubes. I recently read a story about how robust the tube based architecture can be. The story was about a girl who secretly gave birth to a baby and then jogged 4 blocks to the hospital with one of her tubes still attached.
