After the screening, the women took a survey ranking their agreement with several “stalking myths,” such as, “Many alleged stalking victims are actually people who played hard to get and changed their minds afterwards” or “An individual who goes to the extremes of stalking must really feel passionately for his/her love interest.” Those who saw the scary stalking movies were less likely than the control group or the rom-com viewers to endorse these myths. Women who watched the rom-coms endorsed these myths more if they reported feeling transported by the movie, or thinking that the movie was realistic.

The grand gestures of rom-coms (like hiring a P.I. to track down your high-school prom date, as happens in There’s Something About Mary) “are often framed as unequivocal signs of true love,” Lippman writes. “Indeed, they may be seen as reflecting one of the great cultural myths of romantic love: that no matter how big the obstacle, love will conquer all.”

The website TV Tropes, which tracks, wiki-style, frequently-used narrative devices—not just on TV, but in all kinds of fiction—has a page for this. It’s aptly titled “Stalking Is Love.”

Lippman files stalking under the broader umbrella of “persistent pursuit,” which can also encompass “more benign and even positively regarded behaviors such as some types of romantic courtship,” she writes.

According to the National Institute of Justice, “stalking is conservatively defined as ‘a course of conduct directed at a specific person that involves repeated (two or more occasions) visual or physical proximity, nonconsensual communication, or verbal, written, or implied threats, or a combination thereof, that would cause a reasonable person fear.’”

In rom-coms, and also potentially in life, the continuum of behavior from stalking to unwanted attention to assertive courtship can be hard to read. In one study, people (especially men) who had pursued an unrequited love “tended to overreport receiving signals that their love interest was reciprocating, and to underreport receiving rejections.”

Is flying across the country and showing up at someone’s doorstep unannounced to declare your feelings an unhinged violation, or a brave and vulnerable display of love? (My guess is that it’s easier to tell which is which based on the declarer’s reaction if the declaree says they don’t feel the same way.)

The TV show How I Met Your Mother invokes the Say Anything boom-box scene for its “Dobler-Dahmer theory” of romantic gestures. If the recipient of the grand gesture is interested in the gesturer, the character Ted Mosby explains, then it’s charming (like Lloyd Dobler). If the recipient is not interested, the gesture seems creepy and crazy, and the gesturer is branded a Dahmer (à la Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal serial killer.)

And indeed, this brand of “no-just-means-try-harder” romantic pursuit is portrayed differently depending on whether we, the audience, are supposed to understand that these characters are meant to be together. Take, for example, Mr. Collins of Pride & Prejudice, one of the worst hint-takers in literary history, and equally squirrely in his film manifestations. His cousin Elizabeth Bennett’s multiple and clear refusals of his marriage proposal do not keep him from repeating it, convinced she’s just playing hard to get. His steamrolling of her makes him seem pathetic and rude—but then, as we all know, he’s not Elizabeth’s soulmate.