This week, The Tab turned its unremittingly investigative journalistic gaze towards Cambridge’s finest egos, and I voted shamelessly like the rest of you. Casting my columnist’s net further afield, I also reeled in coverage of a study that’s been doing the rounds. Papers from The Telegraph to the New Statesman have reported on study conducted by Julia R. Lippman, which suggests that exposure to romcoms makes women more likely to accept stalker-like behaviour as normal and romantic.

Think about it. When Ben Stiller hires a private detective to follow his teenage crush Cameron Diaz around the other end of the country in There’s Something About Mary, she’s pretty cool with the situation. When an inexplicably sullen man is an arsehole to his best friend’s wife because she’s pretty, later delivering a botched, terrifying wedding video of them featuring some nice shaky close-ups of her face, it’s not a low-budget horror film. Richard Curtis tells us that this is Love Actually. She kisses him. Of course.

From John Cusack’s weird boombox behaviour in Say Anything to Ryan Gosling restoring an actual house in The Notebook because he had sex there with Rachel McAdams that one time, women in the study exposed to these characters were more likely to agree with statements such as ‘an individual who goes to the extremes of stalking must really feel passionately for his/her love interest.’ Obviously, this is bollocks. Love does not, and should not, transcend people’s basic emotional and physical boundaries. Respect, contrary to these tropes, is a fundamental component of relationships, and respect means taking no for an answer.

But as the spotty teenager with a heavy fringe I once was, growing up in front of a television which told me that a girl should go out with a guy as long as he was ‘persistent’ enough, simple mutual respect didn’t really enter my conception of romance.

When I was in the middle of a strange quasi-relationship, my mum asked what I found attractive about him. I scrambled around for something. The girls in the movies never really specified what it was that they liked about the guy they inevitably ended up with. Their transition from ambivalence to ardour never got explained. But they did always end up together. I probably said I liked him because he was funny, even though in reality I winced and laughed politely through his shitty jokes. I honestly just didn’t understand that if he liked me, I had the right to turn him down, that that was a thing which actually happened.

If you’re banging your head against a wall at the naivety of my younger self, then I gladly join you. But even for those not as impressionable as myself, even if the popular culture we consume does not directly affect the way we behave, it still shapes what we come to expect as normal, understandable behaviour from other people. I don’t believe Tarantino films are responsible for gun violence. I’ve seen Pulp Fiction and I’ve never been tempted to rob a diner. But we also do not live out our lives in a vacuum from the culture which both shapes and reflects our attitudes.

It’s easy to watch Ben Stiller stalking Cameron Diaz across Florida and think that this would obviously be a weird and unacceptable situation in real life. But the more hidden assumptions this set-up rests upon do get thoroughly absorbed into our culture, all the more insidiously so because we genuinely believe we’re rejecting the plot for its ridiculousness.

At this point I proudly introduce every woman’s favourite concept: the friendzone. Apparently being nice to a girl works like a vending machine; if you keep feeding in compliments and supportive advice, eventually you deserve a relationship to fall into your hands. Never mind that committing to a relationship with every guy who shows you some kind of attention is a dubious and untenable social model at best – the idea that a woman might have agency in this situation, or that her feelings alone would be valid grounds to say no, doesn’t really come into the equation.

By no stretch of the imagination am I branding romcoms the work of the devil. And no, put your comment piece away, this is not a free speech issue. We can’t ban Katherine Heigl. But with mutual respect still a fundamental issue in young people’s approaches to relationships, it’s not always right to just laugh the creepy off.