Pay for view won't buy you true love

I thought it would be the other way around, that my tastes would become more refined as I grew up. But I confess that the older I get, the more stupid movies I watch. I mean, the other day I sat through Adam Sandler's "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" on pay per view. Was it good? Not really. But it made me chuckle a few times, and it was cold outside and, most important in this economy, it was only $3.99.

I figured, what's the harm? I read and write for a living, and at the end of the week, I'm not really craving deep intellectual content. I had the same attitude going into this last week of the year. I was hoping to shut off my brain, head to a little hut in the desert somewhere, read popular fiction and rent feel-good movies.

But that was before a Scottish university issued an alarming news release warning that romantic comedies "may actually damage your love life." What, are they joking? My first instinct was to dismiss this little tidbit as no more than a gimmick, but then it struck me that romance is not a part of my life that I can afford to jeopardize any more than I already have. The matter definitely merited further inquiry.

Not surprisingly, the British press sank its teeth into the story. "Have Hollywood's romantic comedies stolen our hearts?" asked a headline in the Daily Telegraph. "Slushy movies bad for lovers," screamed the Daily Record. The Daily Mail wrung its hands over what it called the "Notting Hill effect."

But what exactly is the "Notting Hill" effect? Does it have anything to do with Hugh Grant on Curson Avenue in Hollywood? No, frankly, it's much worse.

According to a few enterprising social scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, romantic comedies can raise unrealistic romantic expectations among fans and may therefore set them up for personal failure and a lifetime of disappointment.

I called up Bjarne Holmes, the lead researcher on the project at the university's Family and Personal Relationships Laboratory, to ask him if he wasn't severely underestimating the intelligence of the moviegoing audience. "Oh no," he responded. "Audiences are able to see that movies are not reality. We know this. But there's a little emerging evidence that it still has an impact on our emotional lives."