How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

It’s a quirky story about two people who meet by chance (so it seems). Andie, the protagonist, works for one of the fastest growing beauty magazine companies. She is a deep, intellectual woman yet she is known as “Andie Anderson, the How to Girl”. To save her friend by proposing a unique story, Andie must emanate all the mistakes that women make to lose the guy such as being too clingy, possessive, and moody. Benjamin Barry, on the other hand, works for an advertising and specializes in “sports and beer”. In an attempt to obtain the chance to make a pitch to his company’s new client, a diamond provider, Benjamin is set up by his co-worker competitors to make a girl fall in love with him in ten days. Benjamin’s competitors who know about Andie’s article, match them together.

The story follows with Andie making the “common” mistakes testing Ben’s limits and Ben learning how to manage her. This relationship satisfies Aristotle’s definition of a comedy because Andie and Ben are obviously compatible (as seen during their first meeting), but their rise for power in their jobs forces them apart (although, ironically, it brought them together at first). The hurdles they face are their conflicting objectives and the importance they associate with their jobs. Though humorous, the mingling between the two is more meaningful than it seems. Similar to Pride and Prejudice, Andie acts as the stereotypical drama queen concerning herself in minuscule details when Ben just tries to cope with the relationship he is in. The twist, however, is that they are insanely compatible and only realize this once they escape New York and stay with Ben’s family. Only there can they be true as they are away from the societal pressures of the city and immersed in family life. This reveals that people are not always as they seem for a plethora of reasons.

As Andie quits her job in the end because her promotion does not allow her to write about what she really care about: politics and social events, she realizes that by trying to play the game of being an author of a cliche women’s magazine, she is not being true to herself. Ben also realizes this as he upgrades himself from “sports and beer” to diamonds. Here, both of the characters break through the barriers of stereotypes to discover that they can be whatever they want to be and that they love each other (of course, because it is a romantic comedy). Thus, the takeaway is that one should not let stereotypes and societal expectations hinder them from being true to themselves. The movie does this through over exaggerating the cliche dramatic relationship, thus demeaning it and instead letting a genuine relationship rise with the fall of the facade they both upheld.