“I want you. I need you. Oh baby, oh baby.”: Why 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU’s Kat Stratford And Patrick Verona Are My Ultimate Couple Goals

Rating: 🍝🍝🍝🍝🍝

Trailer

10 Things I Hate About You is one of my favorite movies of all time. You have Save Ferris and Letters to Cleo. You have amazing one liners. You have young Heath Ledger (be still my heart). It’s one of, if not the best, product of the teen Shakespeare adaptations of the late 90s/early 00s. However, there is a dark side to this masterpiece: writers Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith made me a hopeless romantic. 

Obviously, this movie didn’t single-handedly make me a hopeless romantic, but it certainly didn’t help. In addition, it’s the only reason a young Baillee wanted to go to Sarah Lawrence. I think it did heavily influence the way I process a lot of things, and it began my life long love affair with the teen comedy. 

If you’ve somehow been living under a rock (or on Planet “Look at Me, Look at Me.”), 10 Things I Hate About You is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew which centers on the Stratford sisters, played by Julia Stiles and Larisa Oleynik. Oleynik’s Bianca Stratford is the epitome of the bubbly and popular 90s sophomore girl, who teaches us such important life lessons as owning black underwear means you want to have sex, and you can potentially be “whelmed” in Europe. Stiles’s Kat Stratford serves as Bianca’s foil, a self-aware, Letters to Cleo listenin’, platform flip-flip wearin’, and sass totin’ edgy girl, who “maintains [a classmate] kicked himself in the balls.” Their overprotective father, Larry Miller’s Walter Stratford, decides to cave on his strict, no dating after Bianca’s pleas (even though he’s worried about them sleeping in each other’s beds like those damn Dawson’s River kids) with one catch: Bianca can only date... once Kat does. 

As you can probably bet, this sets off a wild chain of trademark teen movie events but with extremely clever writing, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Cameron scheming with David Krumholtz’s Michael to find Kat a boyfriend so that Cameron can sweep Bianca off her feet. Naturally, our resident “bad boy” (who actually just spent the summer eating Spaghetti-O’s and taking care of his grandfather), Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona, is the only guy up for the challenge, so in a very, egotistical, teenage boy move, Cameron and Michael pay Patrick by conning one of the popular guys, Joey, into thinking he’ll be the one to date Bianca instead of Cameron. (Call Avril Lavigne because here’s where it gets “Complicated.”) 

I know this setup doesn’t paint Patrick in the best light because he’s getting paid to take Kat out, but hear me out. Patrick gets Kat out of her comfort zone, and he doesn’t change her. He doesn’t take advantage of her when she’s drunk and is the only one to take care of her, and when he finds out she’s embarrassed, he sings to her from the bleachers (which is honestly the only proposal I’ll accept from a partner). Kat helps Patrick shed the ridiculous rumors about his past (including that he doesn’t have a liver, which is my personal favorite). Kat still applies to Sarah Lawrence and gets accepted without choosing Patrick over her education. Let’s also not forget about THE sonnet that makes me cry during every single viewing. They bring out the best in each other. 

Is their relationship perfect? No. Is it very high school and idealistic? Yes. Do I still love both dark and angsty Patrick and Kat pre-relationship? Yes. I still stand by the fact that their relationship is absolute goals (so y’all can all stop putting stuff about Topanga and Cory on your Bumble), and I won’t argue any other way. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.