Science _has_ taught us a lot about love and romance. In fact, here is a citation on a paper titled "Love; a clinical definition" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13236028 and I personally believe that this type of research is more substantially informative than Ovid and Shakespeare.

I also disagree with your derogation of 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and lumping that one in with 50 First Dates is ludicrous. No, of course they should not take relationship advice from those movies but I think as far as movies depicting relationships go, I find those to be poor examples of movies to avoid. I actually think those movies may be somewhat insightful in certain ways especially when you compare them to many romantic comedies that have come before. So I think you might have picked on some much worse examples. All of that of course is not to say that those movies do not contain some misconceptions.

In social sciences such as those employed by the counselors referenced in the article, we are discussing arbitrarily assigned values of correct or appropriate behaviors. While many western ethnographers might be shocked or confused by native cannibalism practice in New Guinea and elsewhere, if those actions are considered appropriate within their cultural context, is the ethnographer's externally informed reaction (I won't assume they pass judgment) that this behavior is somehow "wrong" a correct assessment? Not according to the natives. This is not an article about hard science, it is a piece about the sociological (soft science) implications of the social experience of movie viewing, and the small group dynamics that may or may not engender.

Could you provide some detail on that paper you referred to? What you provided is a link only to a citation and not even an abstract of the content . I'd certainly be interested to see what's informative about it. Science, in the form of hard science like neurobiology, does indeed have quite a bit to say about what happens in the brain during certain moments identified by the subject as feelings of love or romantic emotion. But these are descriptions of slices of time and conditions describing the states of various parts of the limbic and endocrine systems. They do nothing to describe the social components (macro scope over much larger time versus micro scope over moments or minutes) or complications of a relationship. While describing love in terms of limbic cortical activation might be more informative for what is going on physically, it offers no information about the macroscopic aspects of social interaction.

I rather enjoyed all three films, and don't think I was pejorative toward them at all. I consider them all escapist however, so I wasn't looking for any insight into how people interact romantically or otherwise. At most I was looking for certain endocrine responses (like endorphin release), to put it in hard science terms. And they were not arbitrary choices, 50 First Dates took first place on its opening weekend at the box office (Valentine Day, when I saw it) http://www.redorbit.com/news/general/43028/50_first_dates_tops_weekend_box_office/
40 Year Old Virgin was also a top opener
http://www.hecklerspray.com/40-year-old-virgin-tops-us-weekend-box-office-chart/20051069.php
while Knocked Up was a runner up only because Pirates of the Caribbean 3 also opened that weekend http://www.filmsy.com/comedy/knocked-up-surprises-with-strong-box-office-opening/
As some of the most popular romantic comedies in their respective release weekends, they are equally representative for what the movie-going public is looking for.