The Six Most Unforgivable Lies Told In Rom-Coms

The lie at the center of While You Were Sleeping feels so transgressive to me that to this day I have never been able to finish the film. So here’s the deal: Sandra Bullock plays Lucy, a lonely token collector working for the CTA. She has an obsessive crush on a handsome dude named Peter (Peter Gallagher) who uses her station everyday. When Peter gets mugged and falls into the tracks, she does the heroic thing and saves him. However, he is in a coma, and a miscommunication leads a nurse to identify Lucy to Peter’s family as his fiancé. Here’s where I believe it all goes off the rails: LUCY NEVER CORRECTS THE FAMILY. She poses as his fiancé at Christmas and falls in love with his brother and then when Peter wakes up and doesn’t remember her, she goes further and — OH MY GOD — almost marries him! This is so much worse than lying about a job, background, or social class. THIS IS UNCONSCIONABLE.

— Meghan O’Keefe

Where to stream While You Were Sleeping

Netflix’s holiday hit is harmless enough… until you spend literally a second applying the slightest real world logic to what Amber’s doing. She impersonates a tutor, gaining access to a royal palace (admittedly one with lazy AF background checks). She’s then left unsupervised with a teenage princess for hours on end. Sure, Amber’s a decent enough person, but just imagine telling any mother that–whoops!–their kid’s been hanging out with an imposter all the time! The kicker is, of course, that Amber’s a journalist doing all this in order to write a tell-all expose about the very family that she’s ingratiated herself to! This being a Christmas rom-com, everything turns out all right and Amber doesn’t get charged with conspiracy to commit international espionage.

— Brett White

Where to stream A Christmas Prince

Who hasn’t wished they had a twin to swap places with sometimes? Like when you want to go on vacation instead of go to school, or play on the boy’s soccer team, or sit three feet away from your crush and watch him sleep. One of these things is not like the other, but all three happened in She’s the Man when Viola Hastings (Amanda Bynes) spends half the movie pretending to be her twin brother, Sebastian. While Viola-as-Sebastian’s living arrangement gave us such classics as the tampon scene, and Channing Tatum (!), it also alerted us to the unnerving possibility of your secret admirer really pretending to be someone they aren’t.

— Halle Roberts

Where to stream She's The Man

Mrs. Winterbourne, one of the most underrated rom-coms from the ’90s, features an implausible premise and asks its audience to suspend disbelief. And they do. This remake of the Barbara Stanwyck classic, No Man Of Her Own, and not unlike the aforementioned While You Were Sleeping, adds rom-com elements that brighten the bleak criminal aspects of the tale. Similar to the Stanwyck vehicle, Mrs. Winterbourne starts with a tragic train wreck that leaves the down-on-her-luck pregnant heroine Connie Doyle (Ricki Lake) with a baby but without friends, family or a home. As a result, she is mistakenly identified as the wife of the son of a rich family who died in the accident. The family accepts her and her baby without question, and she is forced by desperate circumstances to step into an assumed identity. When she falls in love with the dead man’s identical twin brother, Bill (peak Brendan Fraser), the rom-com takes over! Zany hijinks and romantic foibles abound, and everyone gets a happy ending despite Connie’s deception.

— Karen Kemmerle

Where to stream Mrs. Winterbourne

Silver Linings Playbook revolves around not just one major lie, but two. When Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) and Pat (Bradley Cooper) first meet, she promises to deliver a letter to Pat’s estranged ex-wife, Nikki, if he dances with her. Instead of actually delivering Pat’s letter, she responds as Nikki, getting his hopes up for a reconciliation that will never happen. Later, we learn that Pat’s parents are in on it, too: they’ve been lying to him about Nikki for months to push him and Tiffany together. Sure, Pat and Tiffany end up together, but was it necessary for everyone in their lives to scheme their way into the relationship? Et tu, Robert DeNiro?

— Claire Spellberg

Where to stream Silver Linings Playbook

So here’s the thing: if you can’t tell the woman you love that you are indeed the mystical “Date Doctor” perhaps it’s because you are ashamed of something? In Hitch, Will Smith doesn’t come right out with the information of his true profession because he knows it would send Sara (Eva Mendes) running — and rightfully so. I mean, his shady “consultant” answer should be a red flag too. Sure, teaching Albert (Kevin James) a dance step or two and persuading him to wax his back is okay, as it’s simply a small upgrade/makeover. But this movie directly launched the whole “pick-up artist” culture that encourages men to interact in different ways with women than they normally would. Ultimately, the moral of Hitch gets it right: Albert got the girl by being himself, Hitch fell on his face by trying to be smooth. But the lies, and usually in the form of uncomfy omissions, should make any woman think twice about building a relationship on those foundations. See also: The Ugly Truth where Gerard Butler feeds lines into Katherine Heigl’s ear to get a guy to like her. *Shiver*

— Lea Palmieri

Where to stream Hitch