Many modern people have probably formed their idea of romantic love through the popular arts. We know from Jane Austen novels that marrying for love is an idea that preceded Hollywood, but people still wed for many other reasons, including simple companionship, convenience and money. Nevertheless, love is the only one they will admit to.

Those few who reject romance out of hand are considered so strange as to be practically extraterrestrial. In the hit movie "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," which has just opened in Japan, the title character, a guy named Andy, has passed through four decades on this planet without once going to bed with anyone. But he's not miserable or misanthropic. He is perfectly happy in his celibacy until his friends find out about it and convince him that he has to have sex in order to find fulfillment as a guy.

The movie's jokes are generated by the contrast between our media-fueled obsession with sex and Andy's disinterest in it. In the end, the filmmakers decide to have him fall in love anyway, which, given the boldness of the movie's comic premise, feels like a cop-out. What's more transgressive than a man who doesn't pursue love, not because he's psychologically deficient or a misogynist, but because he really isn't interested?