The problem is, though, that Venus isn’t always there, waiting to be wooed; sometimes, she must be actively sought. So Ted, in There’s Something About Mary, hires a PI to track down his crush, and this is presented in the film not as evidence of creepiness, but of a Sensitive Guy being Romantic. Lloyd, in Say Anything, arrives at Diane’s bedroom window—his Love-Boombox thrust stubbornly skyward, pulsing with Peter Gabriel—to woo her with song. (The movie, similarly, frames Lloyd’s “okay, then I will just come to your home” gesture as supremely romantic—so successfully, in fact, that the Romeo-at-Juliet’s-window inspired scene is commonly cited in lists of The Most Romantic Movie Moments of All Time.) Dean, the quintessential Nice Guy Boyfriend in Gilmore Girls, begins his Nice Guy arc by following Rory around Stars Hollow without talking to her or alerting her to his presence—simply because, as he later explains, “you’re nice to look at.”

It’s a theme so common that, as my colleague Julie Beck pointed out, the site TV Tropes has a page dedicated to exploring it—“Stalking Is Love,” the page is called. (The trope has also received that highest of cultural ratifications: an Onion headline. “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested,” the fake paper reports, in an “it’s funny because it’s true” kind of way.) The trope also got treatment in How I Met Your Mother, a sitcom-length rom-com that found its romantic protagonist, Ted, similarly showing up—several different times—at the window of his beloved. Ted, ever the theorist, invoked Lloyd “You Will Listen to Peter Gabriel and You Will Love It” Dobler in what he dubbed the “Dobler-Dahmer theory” of grand, romantic gestures. Ted’s theory went like this: If the person on the receiving end of the gesture is romantically interested in the gesturer, then—à la Lloyd Dobler, Heartsick Hero—it’s charming. If not, the gesture will come off as creepy and stalkery and threatening and awful (in the manner of Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibalistic serial killer).

The Dobler-Dahmer theory is helpful not just in its acknowledgement of the high-stakes nature of the romantic gesture, but also in its recognition of the agency of the gesturee. The rom-comic plots it invokes don’t simply celebrate stalker-ish behavior on the part of men; they also, on the flip side, often celebrate passive behavior on the part of women. Many of them treat women either as bundles of buzzing, desperate desire—Love Actually, How to Be Single, He’s Just Not That Into You—or, on the other hand, as empty vessels for it.

Take Hitch, the “love doctor” in Hitch, who introduces himself in the movie that treats him as a romantic hero with the following voice-over:

No woman wakes up saying, “God, I hope I don’t get swept off my feet today.” Now, she might say, “This is a really bad time for me.” Or something like, “I just need some space.” Or my personal favorite: “I’m really into my career right now.” You believe that? Neither does she. You know why? Because she’s lying to you, that’s why. You understand me? Lying. It’s not a bad time for her. She doesn’t need any space.

She’s lying to you. Lying. This, in the context of the film, is presented as cheerful and charming, a realtalk-y acknowledgment of the world’s awkward romantic realities. It would never occur to Hitch to doubt its own intentions—“because with no guile, and no game,” the Love Doctor later explains to a client, “there’s no girl.” Watching Hitch today is uncomfortable not just for all the reasons watching a rom-com might typically be uncomfortable—its assumption of the centrality of romance to feminine life, its downplaying of things like family and friends and career and other vehicles for human spiritual fulfillment, its conviction that a woman must not be simultaneously attractive and single—but also because the film studiously extracts a woman’s own desires from its romantic equation. She says she’s not interested; he assumes she’s lying. She says “no”; he replies, “I will make you say yes.”