The XX Factor: What women really think.

In Which I Read My Blog Post Aloud While I Write It

Willa, you bring up a great point about the attempts and failures by movies and TV shows to capture courtship and romance as it actually exists in 2009, in all its technological glory. That Drew Barrymore speech from He's Just Not That Into You annoyed me, too, because it's Just Not That accurately getting at the issue. For me, the problem isn't fear of rejection via "different portals." When a conversation meanders from Facebook to e-mails to texts to phone calls, I'm not really all that conscious that the portal is shifting. The problem is that, because of all the portals, the bar for rejection has gone from pole vault to hurdle to metal beam lying on the ground. We've come to expect constant communication and instant responses, which means that five minutes of waiting for a reply from a guy (via whatever) can be agonizing. The other day, I actually instructed gchat never to show my boyfriend in my list of friends, because I couldn't handle seeing that green "available" ball next to his name without wondering why he wasn't responding to that e-mail I'd sent him a few hours earlier. (After a few minutes I realized I was being crazy. But you see my point.)

If these new movies and shows don't capture the way love has changed in the era of smartphones, are there better examples out there? Surely not the early attempts like You've Got Mail (does anyone actually read IMs aloud while typing them?). Quarterlife and Gossip Girl seem to understand how people actually use their computers and cell phones, but both treat all things social as if they are tied to a single Web presence, which isn't quite right either. The stars of One Tree Hill are too incestuous to bother with dating sites and too up in one another's faces to need cell phones or e-mail. And on Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs they're still using pagers!

Has anyone actually seen a movie or TV show that does this well—shows people meeting and communicating online or by cell in a way that doesn't make you cringe? Accepting nominations in The Fray!