-to piece on why women fail at romance. This is hands-on how-to: Andie's assignment is to select a new beau and within 10 days do everything women are not supposed to do to spark the flame, thus driving him away and giving negative-example advice to readers. Meanwhile, Ben is an aspiring ad executive who wants a famous diamond account but is competing, in-house, with a two-woman team. These two women have been pitching Composure and know about Andie's assignment. They manipulate him into a wager that he can get any girl to fall in love with him within 10 days, thus proving that he has the chops for an account of the kind that they think is more suited to women's management. They choose the girl for him--Andie--knowing she will sabotage the very relationship he is determined to build.
Coming as Andie and Ben do to their new relationship with mutually opposing agendas, the intentions that inform their behavior are continually frustrated, to great comic effect. Andie clings. She talks baby talk. She uses a computer to construct putative images of what their children will look like; this is day three of the relationship. She gives Ben's masculinity a feminine name, as effective at suppressing it as a cold shower would be. A perfectly normal junk-food junkie, she responds to his painstakingly prepared leg of lamb by explaining that she is a vegetarian. Surely that will make him dump her. A great Knicks fan, she entices him with the promise of great tickets--but they turn out not to be to a Knicks' game but to a Celine Dion concert. She even interrupts his poker-and-pizza night with frivolous preoccupations and cucumber sandwiches. It is all calculated to make Ben tell her to get lost.
Ben, for his part, virtually clings back. He becomes not a metrosexual conquest machine but a perfect gentleman. His preparation of the gourmet dinner is aimed to impress as much as it
...