Reality Bites: She's Just Not That Into You
Feb. 5, 2009 — -- Workplace romances can be inelegant, at best. But what happens when you still have to work with the person after your split?
Just ask actor Justin Long (you might remember him as your friendly, neighborhood Mac guy ), who hooked up with co-star Drew Barrymore on the set of their new movie, "He's Just Not That Into You."
"We all rationalize and analyze to a certain extent," said Long, who plays cynical advice-monger Alex in the film. "But when you're with somebody, you've just got to make the choice to go all in. Sometimes you do and you get your ass kicked. But you can't regret it. That's the nature of love."
Things got even more tricky when the pair split in July, just months after announcing their romance to the world on "Oprah."
"Not only that, but she was his boss, wasn't she?" mused relationship expert Matt Titus about Barrymore, who also produced the film, which is based on the best-selling dating guide by "Sex and the City" writers Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo. "Can you say awkward?"
It seems love, even for Hollywood's biggest stars, is just as complicated and messy as it is for the rest of us.
"Celebrities are people just like you and me," said relationship expert Michelle Callahan, whose book "Ms. Typed" is due for release in May. "Especially women, we can really drive ourselves crazy analyzing every little thing, checking his profile on Facebook or MySpace. Why hasn't he called? Why hasn't he texted? Why hasn't he changed his status? For celebrities, that all plays out to an extreme degree because they're also watching their relationships playing out in the tabloids and on PerezHilton.com. It's probably extremely stressful."
But "He's Just Not That Into You" star Long, for one, believes you can't generalize when it comes to love.
"Relationships are such a strange, subjective thing," he said. "Any sort of general advice or guidebook is kind of obsolete. You have to examine a relationship on a very human, case-by-case basis. In real life, I don't think you can really follow a book's rules on relationships. But maybe I'm wrong."
Titus, whose book, "Why Hasn't He Proposed?," due out next week, distills it this way: "Women inherently just want to be loved. And men, inherently, just want to be laid. That is where all the miscommunication is happening. That's it in a nutshell."
Herewith, relationship experts Titus, Callahan and Cosmopolitan magazine executive editor Nicole Beland offer their take on celebrity hookups, and discover they're just as confused as the rest of us.
