But I strongly suggest you look deeper for the true lesson of "Notting Hill." It is neatly contained in a speech made by Grant's character late in the film when, in a passing moment of clarity, he chases Roberts away with the words, "There are just too many pictures of you. Too many films." Naturally, Hugh goes on to ignore his own wisdom, thereby avoiding a class-action suit by outraged movie patrons. He was right the first time, though, and if you won't listen to him, listen to me. Never fall in love with someone whose image will keep popping up on screens and magazines, pummeling you again and again like a revolving fan blade. It might be fun when you first meet. Just, please, consider the future. A lover may dump you, but the media is forever.

Mary walked into a photo store and got in line behind me one day in 1990. I will spare you the rhapsodic details and merely state that I was subsequently smacked upside the head by a giant Codfish of Love, a larger and more fiercely whiskered codfish than ever had smacked me before. I was addled, cowboy. Mary was a psychology student and sometime choreographer who paid the bills with a steady if unspectacular modeling career. As far as I knew she might also have found part-time work as the sun, moon and stars. My charms evidently proved more fleeting, and our once-torrid relationship was dead after six months. For her, at least.

I was about to embark on one of those embarrassing spirals that tests and finally exhausts the patience of sympathetic friends. Years of determined moping -- inspiring, or perhaps inspired by, a lingering case of depression -- found me unable to process all that excellent get-on-with-your-life advice I kept hearing. Shoveler of my own rut I may have been, but I had help. TV, newspapers, magazines, even bus shelters -- they all conspired to beat me down. Mary's modeling career, it seemed, had just taken off.

Perhaps I simply hadn't noticed it before when the sight of Mary's image was not yet a serrated fish-gutting knife running up my abdomen. I certainly noticed afterward. In those days I worked at a radio station in Vancouver, British Columbia, in the Kitsilano neighborhood, overlooking a busy street. At the bus stop a block away from work, I came face to face with the object of my obsession. Mary, sitting lotus-style with eyes closed and a vaguely orgasmic smile, starred in a life-size poster for a chain of fitness clubs. "Hi Steve!" she said. "How's it hangin'?" I didn't hear that. "See you tomorrow!" she called as I hurried past. The evil cackle was new, I thought.

Mary's drugstore commercial began running every night during the evening news. The jingle was based on a Pointer Sisters hit that still makes me break out in hives. Her modeling appearances in local newspapers were frequent enough to make opening a paper comparable to clicking a faulty light switch, always flinching in anticipation of a sharp shock.

I came to expect such pangs, becoming adept at psychic channel-changing just ahead of the offending ad, or at the very least bracing myself when entering dangerous territory. But it wasn't always possible to be prepared. When the biggest gut punch arrived, I was totally relaxed.

Halfway through "Notting Hill," after Grant has already discovered that his beloved's face on the side of a bus can be a rolling rebuke instead of a thrill, he abuses himself by sitting through her latest film (apparently a remake of "2001," with Roberts displaying the emotive range of HAL the computer. She wins an Oscar anyway). My sympathy for poor Hugh extended only so far -- he, at least, knew what he was in for when he bought his ticket. I was not so lucky.

An emotional haymaker coming out of nowhere caught me midway through the second half of a double bill. I was watching a prominent action figure struggle to animate his role in a detective flick when suddenly the scene changed: We were now in a strip joint. On-screen was a stripper, stripped. As Mary herself later described her appearance, "I was wearing my fillings." I stared stupidly, not sure at first what or whom I was seeing. That the movie was shot in Vancouver hadn't occurred to me, and besides, Mary had not previously been an actor. That was probably still true, although absent any actual dialogue, her smoldering gaze was in fact clearly delivering two unspoken words directly to the onrushing camera. Adding to my confusion, there were definitely parts of Mary I didn't recognize. Special effects, perhaps -- some localized form of 3-D technology? (Surgical effects, she later explained. Modeling is a competitive game.)

The scene lasted only seconds, but by the end I knew. All around the darkened theater, Neanderthals whooped and hooted. I noted with distracted surprise that my head was tingling and I was in danger of fainting. This kind of thing, I thought, simply doesn't happen. Crooners have sung about it, but they were being poetic. Cole Porter would never have written, "I see your face/Everywhere I go/On the street/Or even at the picture show/Playing a stripper/No really, I'm not shitting you here/Baby." Everybody knows the obsessed are paranoid and demented, but this is the kind of stuff they are supposed to be imagining. "You were imagining things," the psychiatrist intones. "Everything. Including Steven Seagal. Starring in a dramatic role? Be reasonable, man."

Later, in the comfort of my own fetal position, I nursed an irrational but dogged sense that I was somehow being punished or even persecuted. For her part, I assumed Mary was in her glory as a big-screen and pinup career beckoned. As so often happens when a former lover becomes a source of unrelenting pain, I had mentally reduced her both in size and character to a chronically infected boil. (I should have guessed that the real person was anything but pleased -- she had been assured that "strategic" camera work would conceal her assets, when in fact the only filmmaking strategy employed had been the one called "Sex sells." So upset was she that a phony name went into the credits. The pain in this situation cut both ways.)

Years later, in yet another darkened theater, this time watching a weeping Julia Roberts flee to Hugh Grant's apartment after seeing her own porno past resurface in the tabloids, the effect was understandably spooky -- one of those odd cinematic coincidences when a movie seems to mimic life.

"Notting Hill" being the kind of movie where audiences emerge playing air violin, it was obvious that the plot would turn out more happily than did my own. I noted ruefully that Julia's crisis brought her back to the loving arms of her precious lid-fluttering Hugh. There was a soft sound in the theater as my reality bubble burst.

By the end of the movie, the hated paparazzi are transformed at a press conference into happy pre-wedding photographers, training lenses on the beaming beaks of our two stunning lovebirds. Suddenly they don't mind the media a bit. For that matter, I suppose I can't complain either -- eventually I did get it together and move on with things. Sometimes I even show up in the papers. Mary, I imagine, is reading something else.