overthinking “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days”
+ I guess we could've almost not really had "Hate Read" season 3?
I thought the third season of House of the Dragon was worth paying attention to for the costume design alone, but in the aftermath of the finale, I now find myself embarking on a treat that I long figured I would save for some future (possibly depressed) version of myself: a rewatch of all of Game of Thrones. What can I say, this summer has really drummed up an appetite for sprawling fantastical epics! So far, I can vouch that actually knowing what’s going on really improves the viewing experience.
The Sheila Heti short story, “Earthly Delights,” from a couple of New Yorkers ago was amazing. It’s much hornier than her usual fare — I read it a bit open-mouthed while waiting for friends at the edge of the Grand Army Plaza farmer’s market on Saturday — and just when you think you’re in for a regular bout of bourgeoise longing, a nice little cosmic twist awaits. I also don’t recall Heti making this much use of italics and all-caps, which puts the writing here in a really adorable register of earnestness. Need this upcoming April 2027 novel like WATER.
It was actually a good overall weekend for earnestness: Rachel and I took it upon ourselves to rewatch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (I guess we all saw the same podcast clip about it), and we found it more charming than we remembered. When I first saw this movie ages ago, I remember feeling very put off by how contrived the stakes were — spoilers ahead in case you are pure of heart and haven’t seen this 2003 classic. While the idea that Andie (Kate Hudson) decides she’s going to pick up and dump a guy purely for content (i.e. her column at Composure magazine) is standard for 2000s rom-com fare, Ben’s (an exquisitely spry Matthew McConaughey) driving motivation, wherein he has to prove to his boss at the ad agency that he can handle pitching a big account by successfully romancing a woman is 1) still kind of a conceptual stretch and 2) also kind of weirdly niche advertising inside baseball (Mad Men would not begin airing for another four years) to foist upon a general audience; did we all get that in 2003?
Maybe it was helped by all the early 2000s fashion (the custom backless butter-yellow Carolina Herrera dress yes, but all of Andie’s outfits — especially that gray dress when they meet!) and the fact that much of the plot centers around the Knicks being in the NBA finals lol, but the movie as a whole wound up feeling surprisingly relevant, especially with regards to our prevailing heterofatalist vibe. Here were our romantic leads, each entering into a relationship with their own separate careerist agendas that no longer seem so contrived in an era when everyone’s doing everything for the content: One could easily envision a 2026 version of this where Andie is a TikTokker who dishes about her dating life, and Ben is a manosphere-adjacent hustler who has to prove his ability to pull to his brethren.
To prove her point about how there are universally “correct” and an “incorrect” ways to approach dating, Andie plays into every conventional red flag she can think of (today, she would call this “not tapping into her feminine energy”). Ben responds by being what we now call “conflict-avoidant.” Shit only gets real once the two visit Ben’s family in Staten Island, wherein Andie has the dawning realization that Ben exists as a person outside of her own designs on him — turns out, he has a whole family who cares deeply for his happiness! Let the record show that I actually really love this as an idea, that seeing a person in the full context of their tribe is both wildly attractive and also often the crucial element that makes connection “real” — to realize this person is not just a name on your phone. (To communicate her growth and maturity, Andie’s hair is shown curly going forward from here in the film.)
The inevitable reveal at the jewelry brand activation party (lol) then leads to what I felt was an actually interesting central conflict: Confronted with the fact of each of their less-than-pure intentions, the pain of each other’s betrayal is thus layered on top of Andie and Ben’s respective guilt and self-loathing, which is why that duet-from-hell of “You’re So Vain” feels so justifiably nasty. There are no pure victims here, which I imagine is why Andie/Ben are romanticized less than all the other famous 2000s rom-com couples, whose good intentions are usually the definitive personality trait.
Re: the ending, my read is that the movie actually makes an argument that Andie is more in the wrong than Ben — he comes off as the more aggrieved one, he gets the zinger breakup line (“well congratulations, you did it, you just lost him!”), she is the one who apologizes in the end (in the form of her very public column, of course). Which sort of fascinates me: Is the implication of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days that Andie’s “sin” of sabotaging a relationship on purpose is actually worse than Ben’s “sin” of sticking things out, and also worse than their shared “sin” of entering into the relationship with ulterior motives in the first place? Perhaps the idea of love as tis pivotal experience of being called on your own bluff isn’t as romantic as the idea of fate, or forever-enduring soulmates, but for our 2026 purposes, I think it’s quite audacious.
Well, if all that was a little too #hopecore for you, there’s always this Wired piece that had the stomach to actually interview the ghosters in the (apparently not that rare??) phenom of people walking out on long-term partners, cold turkey. Perhaps actually the most romantic part of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is that they talked it out???
Did you hear that Mackenzie Scott has been serializing her post-divorce novel on Substack? You can get enough out of Keziah Weir’s writeup of the book so far to decide if it’s for you or not. I’m thinking it’s not gonna be my exact cup of tea, but I do respect Ms. Scott’s innovations with the menu bar across her Substack’s homepage — imagine being able to so easily click into a tab for a characters list for, say, a George R. R. Martin joint! But maybe you don’t need to publish each chapter (so far titled after days of the week — what’s going to happen when we get into chapter 8?) on that menu bar as well? Mostly because you’ll run out of space by Friday, I wager. Just my $0.02, big M! I support your endeavors generally!
Finally… and this is off-theme I suppose…..but while I can’t pretend to have invented the tradition of people complaining on the internet……………………..I also don’t reaaaaaaaaaaally know what to think of Substack hosting an event recently where there’s something called a “Hate Round” that features writers/personas who begin with the words, “I hate…” and then proceed to deliver short, comedic rants about pet peeves, such as Venmo………………………………………………………………………. Like if you really wanted to do Hate Read Season 3, just text me back babe?