Runaway Bride, a film that saw Julia Roberts in her last phase of the 90s before transitioning into Oscar roles only or nothing at all (meaning a greater paucity of straightforward rom-coms), canonized the very overt definition of what a runaway bride is, while also going deeper into the meaning: a person in a relationship incapable of being their own entity, therefore mimicking all the interests, behaviors and aesthetics of their significant other so as to make it easier on themselves in terms of forever avoiding self-exploration. This is precisely why Maggie Carpenter (Roberts) can’t even decide on her own damn eggs, favoring the adoption of whatever he likes best. It just makes it all so much more effortless in terms of ignoring one’s own total lack of personality.

Surprisingly, however, this tendency is most apparent in “men” in the epoch called “We’re Too Fucking Afraid of Women to Be Ourselves and We’re Kind of Just Trying to Secure Pussy at Any Cost–Even If It Means Renouncing Our Own Vacuous Thoughts and Feelings.” In the past, of course, it was a comportment that might have been easily chalked up to a woman reading too many “lifestyle magazine” articles about how to catch a man, keep a man and forever please him. Over time, however, her sole desire has become how to ditch this fucking dead weight (which is much harder than catching a “man” ever was). Especially once he starts copping her style–from sartorial steez to haircut to speech patterns and specific word choices (Jesus, F. Scott Fitzgerald much?). It’s enough to make a girl want to change her name, change her address, change her Instagram handle. But she doesn’t, instead bearing with the offensive poseurdom in the hope that she might one day procure an orgasm in the interim period before the sex robots liberate us all from feigned attempts at emotionalism.