On Christmas Eve 2025, a women’s magazine called Evie Magazine published an article titled, “Why Does Hollywood Keep Telling Women To Pick Broke Men?” The author of the article was Carmen Schober.
Schober’s general thesis was that modern Hollywood movies often show women choosing subpar men over better men, with female characters “following their hearts” and pursing a “man-child-turned-hero-fantasy.”
Schober argued that modern movies often show women passing on men who would make better longer-term partners – men, who, in the movies, “dressed well, worked hard, [and] did not need to ‘grow up’.” According to Schober, the alternative presented to women in these movies are men who are incompetent, unkempt, and financially insecure. Abstract examples of subpar men given by Schober included “a broke poet with commitment issues, a boyish drifter with no plans for the future, or an eccentric loner obsessed with escaping convention at all costs.”
Schober concluded that movies that depict women choosing subpar men over better man are propaganda because research and polling data show that women desire the traits embodied by the men who the women are rejecting in the movies.
I agree with Schober that Hollywood movies often portray non-serious men in ways that make them more interesting, important, and desirable than they would be in real life. Actor Kevin Sorbo made broadly similar points in his 2023Fox News article titled, “Let’s make Hollywood manly again,” which Icovered at The Nuzzo Letter. Nevertheless, I think Schober’s aim was off when she critiqued the movie The Notebook.
The Notebook and Its Importance
The Notebook was a 2004 adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks’ book of the same name. It starred Rachel McAdams as Allie Hamilton, Ryan Gosling as Noah Calhoun, and James Marsden as Lon Hammond, Jr.
The Notebook is adored by many audiences. It has an IMDB rating of 7.8 out of 10, which is solid for a romantic movie in an anti-romantic age. The Notebook also plays at outdoor cinemas in Australia around Valentine’s Day every year, again signalling the movie’s broad appeal.
I think the theme and characters of The Notebook warrant careful examination for a couple of reasons. First, I think The Notebook will be central to the eventual romantic counterrevolution in movies. Second, an examination of The Notebook can help people understand their own partner preferences and relationships, which is partly why Schober wrote her article in the first place.
Schober’s Argument
In her article, Schober argued that Allie should have chosen Lon to be her lifelong partner rather than Noah. However, in arguing this position, Schober made direct claims and indirect suggestions about Noah that were inaccurate. Here, I address these inaccuracies, and I argue that they invalidate Schober’s position and that Allie’s choice of Noah was a rational one.
Character Traits
One reason that Schober believed that Allie should have picked Lon over Noah is because Lon exhibited the following desirable partner traits: virtuous, successful, respectful, smart, fun, supportive, kind, reliable, fit, and good-looking. By implication, Schober suggested that Noah did not embody these traits or that he embodied these traits to a much lesser extent than did Lon. Yet, there is nothing in the movie that suggests Noah is not virtuous, successful, respectful, smart, fun, supportive, kind, reliable, fit, or good-looking.
Noah Was Not “Emotionally Volatile”
Schober also argued that another reason Allie should have picked Lon over Noah is because Noah’s character was “emotionally volatile.” However, this claim is not supported by a holistic evaluation of Noah’s character. Noah was kind, funny, passionate, and deeply in love with Allie. To the extent that one wants to claim that Noah’s character was emotionally volatile, perhaps one might cite the scene where Noah kicks the deck chair. Or one might cite the scene where Noah half-heartedly tries to sell the house that he built for Allie, and he pulls out his shotgun when the potential buyer offers him more than his asking price. However, these scenes are used artistically to reinforce Noah’s love for Allie more than they are to show character flaws in Noah.
Noah was no danger to Allie, and to the extent that he displayed emotional volatility, it was less than the emotional volatility displayed by Allie. In two different scenes, Allie pushes Noah and slaps his face. Noah did not push or hit Allie in return, and his continued love and devotion toward Allie after these events shows how lucky Allie was to have him as an option for a lifelong partnership. Also, one should not forget Allie’s emotional outbursts when she called Noah a “b*****d” and “son of a b***h,” after he accused her of partnering with Lon because Lon has a lot of money.
Finally, Schober’s statement about Noah’s supposed emotional volatility implies that Lon was not emotionally volatile. This implication about Lon is uncertain because Lon and Allie’s relationship received less screen time and spanned fewer and more matured years than Noah and Allie’s relationship. Thus, Lon might have also been emotionally volatile, but we simply did not see enough of him to know.
Noah Was Not “Directionless”
Schober also claimed that Noah was “directionless for most of the story.” Yet, there is little in the movie to suggest that Noah’s life did not have direction. Noah worked at the lumberyard throughout the movie, and like Lon, Noah served in combat in World War II. Lon was a white-collar professional, whose life trajectory was helped by his family’s “Old Southern money,” whereas Noah came from a working-class background and was raised by his father. However, just because Lon worked in a higher status job and presumably made a higher salary than Noah does not mean that Noah’s life was “directionless.” When not working in the lumberyard, Noah spent much of his time building the house that he had promised Allie – an act of direction and dedication. In fact, when Allie reunited with Noah, and they were in the canoe, Allie told Noah that the house he built, and his commitment to finishing it, were “beautiful.” Finally, to the extent that Noah’s life lacked any degree of direction, it is clear from the story that Allie was the missing piece.
Noah Was Devoted to Allie
Schober also criticized Noah as being undependable and “a guy who disappears for years.” Schober also expressed frustration with Noah for not reaching out to Allie after building the house for her, adding that Noah “just broods and hopes she’ll come around.”
Here, Schober seems to have forgotten the part of the movie where Noah writes Allie one letter each day for a year, which was Noah’s attempt at reconnecting with Allie after she moved away for school. Unfortunately, Allie’s mom stole each of Noah’s letters from the mailbox before Allie could see them. Thus, during that year, Allie was entirely unaware that Noah was reaching out to her. Allie’s mom only shares the letters with Allie later in the movie, after Allie is an adult and engaged to Lon.
Because Allie never saw Noah’s letters at the time when they were written, Allie believed that Noah did not love her. Moreover, because Noah assumed that Allie had received the letters, but chose not to respond to them, he assumed that Allie did not love him and did not want to communicate with him. Thus, contrary to Schober’s position, there was no reason for Noah to continue to actively pursue Allie. Noah’s decision to no longer pursue Allie was also reinforced, when, several years after last communicating with Allie, Noah incidentally saw her with Lon in the restaurant in Charleston.
Nevertheless, even after all that, Noah still built the house that he had promised Allie, and his physical actions in building the house were likely the masculine expressions of his emotions.
Finally, if Schober was broadly suggesting that Noah was not adequately devoted to Allie, then her understanding of The Notebookis wildly out of touch. Noah’s devotion to Allie was one of movie’s central themes!
Two Great Choices
The reality is that Allie had two great men to choose from, and the evidence that Allie chose well with Noah is written into the story. The movie depicts the moment that Allie and Noah first met, the moment they died together, and many moments in between. Allie and Noah remained married until their simultaneous deaths, and they had three children together. Thus, an odd aspect of Schober’s position is that the story itself shows viewers the evidence that Allie made a great choice, because the movie depicts their relationship until its very end.
Had Allie chosen Lon, she would have also likely had a generally good life. In fact, the script is so well written that it informs viewers of what this counterfactual situation would have been. The movie suggests that the relationship between Allie and Lon will be like the relationship between Allie’s mother and Allie’s father, with Lon turning out to be like Allie’s father. We know that this is the likely counterfactual situation because of the scene where Allie’s mother drives Allie to the construction site. In that scene, Allie’s mother shows Allie the man that she passionately loved when she was Allie’s age. Allie’s mother admits that she sometimes drives to the site just to watch the man work and to contemplate about how different her life might have been had she married that man rather than Allie’s father.
This scene also connects back to the scene where Allie was younger and was caught being out late with Noah. During that scene, Allie’s mother calls Noah “trash” and tells Allie that she needs to stop seeing Noah. Young Allie fired back at her mother, telling her mother that she does not look at, touch, or play with Allie’s father the same way that Allie does those things with Noah. Without knowing it at the time, young Allie was reminding her mother about what her mother used to feel when she was previously in the relationship with the man from the construction site.
Schober ignored the importance of the construction site scene, as well as the subsequent scene when Allie’s mom gives Allie the letters that Noah wrote. These two scenes are crucial in understanding the causal pathway that led to Allie to choose Noah over Lon.
Importantly, Allie’s mom does not tell Allie which of the two men to choose. Instead, she hands Allie the letters and says, “I hope you make the right choice.” This is impressive script writing from the standpoint of romantic realism. The final climatic decision still rests with Allie, and the decision is difficult. The difficulty stems from the fact that Allie has two great men to choose from, and this is part of what makes The Notebook a heart-grabbing story. If Allie’s decision were easy, the movie would amount to a cheesy romance story where everything goes perfectly from start to finish, with characters never presented with challenges and difficult decisions.
Allie’s life would have likely turned out okay with Lon, but the script is clear that there is something deeper in Allie that keeps drawing her back to Noah. For example, at the very moment that Allie said “yes” to marrying Lon, Noah’s face came to her mind. Also, in the scene where Allie was being fitted for her wedding dress, she faints as soon as she sees the photograph of Noah in the newspaper.
Allie kept thinking of Noah because she sensed something was missing with Lon. This was communicated in the story multiple times. In the scene where Allie visits Lon at his work, she has a confused and lost look on her face and says, “I don’t paint anymore. I used to paint all the time. I really loved it.” Lon then replied that he did not know that Allie liked painting. Then, later in the movie, when Allie is in the room at the Seabrook Inn with Lon, she tells him that she feels like a completely different person when she is with him compared to when she is with Noah. And then there is the scene where Noah confronts Allie, saying to her, “You’re bored! You’re bored and you know it! You wouldn’t be here if something wasn’t missing.”
The missing piece for Allie – the thing that made her feel different with Noah and drawn back to him – is something called sense of life.
Sense Of Life
Novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand described sense of life as the “integrated sum of a man’s basic values.” She explained that a sense of life is “involved in everything about that person, in his every thought, emotion, action, in his every response, in his every choice and value, in his every spontaneous gesture, in his manner of moving, talking, smiling, in the total of his personality. It is that which makes him a “personality.”
Rand also noted that there are “two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.”
Regarding love, Rand explained:
“Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul…It’s is one’s own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one’s own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.”
Psychologist Nathaniel Branden, who was Rand’s one-time understudy and lover, added years later:
“Romantic love entails, at its core, a profound and shared sense of life. A sense of life is the emotional form in which we experience our deepest view of existence and our relationship to existence…reflecting the subconsciously held sum of our broadest and deepest attitudes and conclusions concerning the world, life, and ourselves.”
The Notebook repeatedly portrays Noah and Allie’s shared sense of life, and a key difference between Lon and Noah is that Noah understands Allie’s sense of life better than Lon does. Though Allie and Lon were not entirely mismatched, Allie and Noah were more intimately connected at a deeper subconscious level, which amplified the lock and key of their masculine and feminine energies.
Noah’s understanding of Allie’s sense of life is first depicted during their walk home from their first date at the cinema. In that scene, Allie remarks that she had forgotten how much she enjoys the cinema. She confesses that she had not been to the cinema in several years, because her parents organise a busy schedule for her. Noah then asks Allie what she likes doing for herself rather than for her parents. Initially, Allie does not have an answer. Her lack of answer then causes Noah to challenge her about how free she feels in her life.
Noah then convinces Allie to lie with him on the road to look up at the traffic lights. Allie is reluctant to participate in the activity, but eventually she submits. After she relaxes, Allie turns to Noah and finally answers his question, saying that painting is an activity that she enjoys doing for herself. She then tells Noah that when she has the paint brush in her hand, her thoughts calm and the world gets quiet. After a bit of silence, a car then speeds toward Noah and Allie, causing them to jump to the sidewalk. After the road dust settles, Allie starts laughing hysterically. She enjoyed the thrill. Noah had made her feel noticed and alive at all levels, and this is what Lon was unable to give to Allie. It was the same thrill and release that Allie felt years later when she reconnected with Noah and they were in the canoe. They get poured on by rain, and Allie again feels the release, thrill, and comfort in being with Noah. After they reach the dock, Allie’s passion for Noah comes bursting out: “Why didn’t you write me? Why? It wasn’t over for me. I waited for you for seven years. And now it’s too late.” At this point, Noah tells Allie about the 365 letters that he wrote for her, but that she never received. Then, the begin kissing and Allie stays the night with Noah.
One important sense of life aspect that unfolds that night is the remark that Allie made Noah after they had sex. With a smile on her face, she says: “All this time, that’s what I have been missing?” This statement is important because it again illustrates that something was missing for Allie in her relationship with Lon. At its highest potential, sex is the ultimate celebration of romantic love. Thus, shared sense of life is also important for amazing sex. Nathaniel Branden once said:
“Sex is unique among pleasures in its integration of body and mind. It integrates perceptions, emotions, values, and thoughts. It offers us the most intense form of experience in our own total being, of experiencing our deepest and most intimate sense of self.”
Two days later, after Allie wakes up from her second night staying with Noah, she is guided by a bedside note and several arrows taped to the floor to a room in the house that has paints, paint brushes, and a canvas. Noah had kept his promise in building a place in the house where Allie could paint. This scene reinforces the idea of art as an important aspect of matched sense of life, and here, one should remember that Noah was well read in poetry, and this was also something that Allie liked about Noah. Thus, both Noah and Allie appreciated art, and they likely enjoyed most of the same art due to their shared sense of life. Any interest that Lon had in art was not depicted in the movie, but he was depicted as being entirely unaware of Allie’s interest in painting.
Allie and Noah’s shared sense of life is then carried through to the end of the movie, when they parish together in their elderly and ill years. Noah sneaks into Allie’s room in the nursing home and lies in bed with her. Allie eventually asks him, “Do you think our love can create miracles? Do you think our love can take us away together?” Noah replies, “I think our love can do anything we want it to.” The next morning, a nurse walks into the room to find the two of them lying in the bed, holding hands, dead.
The reason that this final scene is a tear-jerker for many viewers is because it reflects the deepest possible connection between two lovers that one can possibly imagine. It is both sad and profoundly moving.
Conclusion
Getting the theme and characters of the movie The Notebook correct is important because the movie itself is important. In my opinion, The Notebook is the best concretization of romantic love that has ever been depicted on the big screen. The story emphasises the importance of a shared sense of life, and the causal pathways of the characters’ decisions are tightly linked throughout the movie’s plot. The Notebook exemplifies Romantic Realism, because the movie neither depicts life as overly easy nor as overly deterministic. Instead, The Notebook shows characters learning and navigating challenging situations in pursuit of their values, namely romantic love. The movie climaxes when Allie makes her final decision and chooses Noah to be her lifelong partner.
Before she launched into a non-objective attack on the character Noah Calhoun from the movie The Notebook, Evie Magazine contributor Carmen Schober said that readers need to “step back” and “assess [the movie] with a little more clarity.”
Given Schober’s character analysis and her interpretation of the movie’s theme, I would like to close by recommending one thing to her.
Take one more step back and fall into the arms of Noah.
Related Content at The Nuzzo Letter
SUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTER
If you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you.
Thanks for reading The Nuzzo Letter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com
