Often, our greatest enemies are the fears that we create in our own minds. The fear of getting into a relationship, falling in love, and being hurt can lead us to avoid the problem altogether by simply not getting into that relationship. In the age of the internet, we can have a reasonably fulfilling social life by chatting online with friends whom we've never met in real life, play games with them, have a beer with them, and avoid the emotional risk that we take every time we put our trust in someone in the real world, whether that trust be geared toward a friendship or a romantic attachment.

This fear is common for all of us, whether we are the extrovert at the party who is the first to get up and dance, or the introvert that sits in a corner sipping a soda and nervously engaging in small talk.

Whereas most romantic comedies go out of there way to make those people who quietly sit in the corner at parties feel nervous and inadequate about themselves, The 40 Year Old Virgin champions their cause. This time it is the extroverts who are squirming nervously in their seats as the movie progresses.

This is a movie, like Free Enterprise that came out a few years back, which champions the nerd. Unlike Free Enterprise, however, it doesn't feel that it has to lie to make people identify with the protagonist. If I may be so bold, it is probably the first time that I've seen a true nerd portrayed accurately in a movie.

Andy is our titular forty year old virgin. But he is not an unhappy man, wallowing in some sort of pathetic existence. In fact, as he tells us early in the movie his life is quite a fulfilling one, although it may be a little strange for the majority of the movie going public. He has an enviable collection of toy action figures, he plays all sorts of video games, and my personal favorite, enjoys painting metallic miniatures.

Nevertheless, the group of guys with whom he works, take it on as their mission to get him laid. It is at this point that the true comedy begins and we learn about the two main messages of the movie.

Andy is more than just a sexual virgin. His lack of luck in the bedroom, which really stems from a few embarrassing sexual incidents earlier in his life, has led him to become a social recluse. He doesn't really hang out with anybody other than the older couple upstairs, whom we only see interacting with him from their balcony. When he does start going out with the guys from work, they play a series of pranks on him. Sure, pranks seem horrible, but the truth of the matter is that in a guy's world it is these social pranks that build one's resistance to other embarrassing experiences in life. One gets the distinct impression that if Andy had had more experiences like this in High School, he wouldn't have let the two or three awkward sexual experiences we see on screen drive him into complete social reclusion.

The other point of the movie is that Andy's more sexually active buddies aren't any more capable of finding happiness than he is. One of his friends, David, is still trying to get over the girl he was in love with two years ago, a woman we find out who is so unstable herself that David is better off without her. His other friend, Jay, has a stable girlfriend but finds himself cheating on her to make up for his own lack of self-confidence. Meanwhile Seth is the guy who always talks big, but never really seems to score. Over the course of the film, Andy eventually learns that they really aren't any better off than he, and in fact, it is their friendship with Andy that helps the other guys fix their own lives.

Andy meets the love of his life early in the film. Trish, who runs an eBay store, has three mostly normal kids but whose life is as lonely and devoid of true romantic love as anybody else in the cast.

The scenes where Andy calls her up repeatedly, only to hang up the phone or pretend to be somebody else are classic, as is his discovery that it is really not that hard to meet a girl and have her interested in him.

The other important lesson that Andy learns in the film is that nobody really treats him like a pariah when they find out he is a virgin. In fact, one of his co-workers is relieved because it means that Andy is not a psychopathic killer. The other guys may give him a hard time, but they genuinely like and care about him and want him to be happy as he struggles with the fear of telling Trish that he is still a virgin entering into his fifth decade.

And like most of our fears, Andy learns his fears are more traumatic in his head than they are in real life.