The XX Factor: What women really think.

How Women Talk to Women About Men

So, who saw He's Just Not That Into You last weekend? I had all the complaints I thought I would. The 8,000-person cast meant no character or storyline could develop beyond the fairly superficial. Vague jobs requiring scant hours and minimal concentration somehow paid for breathtaking apartments. And no group—women, men, gays, Africans—escaped total stereotype.

None of those gripes kept me from getting sucked in and teary-eyed as I watched the characters fret their way through happy-hour courtships, sultry affairs, lavish home renovations, and general realizations about love. What made it more than your typical rom-com was the use of themes and taglines from the book of the same title on which it's based (which itself was based on a Sex and the City episode)—a gimmick that starts in the surprisingly insightful first scene. In the opening, a mom tells her adorably expressive prepubescent daughter that the boy who pushed her on the playground did it because he has a crush on her. (You can watch it in this preview.) The playground gives way to a montage of various women advising their female friends on love problems, all by making excuses rather than delivering the obvious truth that, cue the title screen, he's just not that into them. In other words, the white lies that start at childhood turn into a parade of convoluted, esteem-boosting reasons that women give one another throughout life about why guys are treating us like crap. ("Maybe he hasn't called because his cell phone died." "He may be avoiding commitment now, but that's what my husband was like, too, until he came around.") Well-intentioned, but detrimental, since those responses delude us into thinking that we will get to waltz away with a storybook ending to a bad romantic start instead of facing the facts and moving on.

But the well-delivered message of the introductory scene wasn't adequately resolved. The only character who ever offers those no-nonsense, hard-to-hear truths about how guys are feeling is a guy. So if the point is supposed to be that women should change the way they talk to one another about love, it doesn't seem that any of the characters got that message. (Or text. Or Facebook wall post. Or any of the other methods of communication that lead to Drew Barrymore's silly little drugstore rant.)

What do you all think? When a guy seems uninterested in your friend, is the best thing for you to do is say so? Or is there a value to offering possible excuses to preserve your friend's ego and keep her hope alive? After all, sometimes his cell phone really DID die.