I didn’t know why but I felt like being alone and in a bummy mood. Sometimes this happens to girls. Sometimes all you wanna do is get into something comfy on the couch and watch a movie you’ve already seen a billion times. Chuck the phone in a corner where you aren’t tempted to pray for someone to text you, where you won’t check facebook and twitter and email and all the other junk. Lots of times the things you need to add to this mix is a bottle of wine and Ryan Gosling.

He barely opens his mouth when he talks but he always asks the right questions, says the right things, and he wants to dance in the street at midnight. You can run and jump into his arms and he will catch you. If you’re a bird, he’s a bird. He wrote to you everyday for a year. He rows your boat through a million perfectly white geese and you’ve never felt or seen someone fall in and make so much perfect love.

The Notebook is the quintessential chick flick. Defined by urbandictionary.com as “A film that indulges in the hopes and dreams of women and/or girls. A film that has a happy, fuzzy, ridiculously unrealistic ending.” This is so true. Notebook has all the necessary ingredients that make girls’ hearts go aflutter…makeout scene involving a piano (pretty woman – pretty much the beginning of them all), rich girl and boy from the wrong side of the tracks (every movie ever), parents/best friend who are against it because of a dark secret from the past (every movie ever), passionate love followed by misunderstanding and then a happy ending (when harry met sally, and all things based on shakespeare and austen. which is everything).

I love this film, and all chick flicks, but at the same time, I think movies like this may have ruined us. Because of these chick flicks films, I expect a total formula for my romantic life. I expect to be the beautiful girl with the quirky personality and a hidden artistic talent, a dream job with a terrible boss, very little pay but somehow a huge apartment and great clothes. And my hair looks perfect when I wake up in the morning. I expect a funny sidekick and wacky family members. And I expect a crazy love to start during the summer, at either a fair, farmers market, book store, or really swanky bar, and I expect to feel crazy, unexplainable love at first sight. I expect rain and thunder whenever I’m sad and bad things happen. I have a good idea about how I’m supposed to laugh at his jokes, how I should slide down a bathroom wall when I cry when we break up (for the conflict part of the movie of our lives), how I should look out the window at the rain and then see the man of my dreams with a stereo held high playing our favorite song. Or I expect the boy to come rushing in to stop me from leaving on a flight. I think that boys will have feelings and be able to verbally express them. I expect unrealistic random acts of romance. And I definitely expect a soundtrack to accompany all the important moments of my life.

But all these things aren’t real. They are dreams fed to us by Hollywood and Nicholas Sparks and dreamy Ryan Gosling and his gang of handsome, brooding hotties. Real life is messy and complicated, and boys are rarely waiting for you for seven years, they rarely build your house of dreams, they never act how you hope they would and your hair is always terrible in the mornings.

But it doesn’t make these chick flicks any less perfect to watch. To dream about what it would be like if life were a movie. Hey….Rachel McAdams…Rachel Danger W….that could be me with Ryan. :)

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