I finally watched The Notebook

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but it turns out “Jaws” isn’t exactly date movie material. It’s an older film that relies on a whole lot of dialogue which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the opening scene is traumatizing — because it’s a movie about a freaking man-eating shark.

Things don’t improve much when not 15 minutes later the Kitner boy gets eaten. These are details that escape you when you’re wandering the aisles of Hastings with a pretty girl earlier in the evening looking for a worthwhile film. Sure there’s plenty of nervous tension in Jaws, along with the single greatest jump-scare in cinematic history, but for the most part it’s guys arguing with the mayor and then guys out sailing on a boat, right?

Yeah, no. For a PG movie — PG-13 wasn’t a thing back then — it definitely includes several people getting eaten right up. It’s probably not the sort of film you’d want to rent for a relaxed movie night. My date was on edge the whole film asking if someone was going to die the second they stepped foot on screen. I felt a little bad.

What happened next made me feel considerably less bad.

Flipping through her rather impressive binder of movies, I let slip the fact that through 24 glorious untainted years of living on this earth, I’d never seen The Notebook. Note that there were several other movies about which I made this same observation, but the words had barely left my mouth before her copy of The Notebook rested comfortably in the DVD tray.

Never before had I been in the kind of bind that would require me, out of basic human decency, to watch The Notebook. “She did just sit through Jaws,” I told myself, rationalizing that this was just some kind of karmic revenge for thinking a movie about a killer shark was a good idea. The inevitability of what was about to happen overcame me, and the film began.

So there I sat, watching Ryan Gosling act like a complete idiot in his attempts at wooing Rachel McAdams wearing way too much red lipstick, knowing in the back of my mind I was little better than he. Gosling hung from a Ferris wheel for a girl, and I looked on from a couch in the LLC downing graham crackers and watching The Notebook for the same exact reason.

If anything, Gosling’s actions early in the movie were actually kind of badass. What a horrible feeling, to realize you’re less of a badass than Ryan freaking Gosling, the baby-faced failure of a defensive back from Remember the Titans.

I watched the whole thing with varying degrees of emotional investment. Admittedly, I was glad to see the couple display exactly zero character growth in order to end up together by the end of the film, but I was also a little ticked off James Marsden didn’t end up with Martha the army widow.

All in all, it was pretty much the exact type of sappy “But Daddy, I love him” level movie you’d come to expect from Nicholas Sparks. Except it wasn’t bad.

Yeah that’s right, I’ll put it in writing — The Notebook isn’t a bad flick at all. While it’s deservedly come to represent all that is cheesy and cliche about love stories in cinema, it’s not worth the effort it’d take to hate it. There are worse movies out there to con yourself into watching, movies with shimmering wussy vampires or Shia LaBeouf in them.

I’m no longer in the estimated 2 percent of people who haven’t sat through The Notebook from start to finish, but I couldn’t be happier. Sometimes you just have to let yourself like what you like and not worry about the pending chaos it’ll cause when your coworkers find out. That being said, I’ll still never watch Titanic — I don’t care how many Oscars DiCaprio has.

— Logan Jones is a junior majoring in journalism. He hasn’t seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” either, and probably never will. Contact him at Logantjones@aggiemail.usu.edu or on twitter @Logantj.