I love you, man!:I love you too, man. Forget wives, girlfriends and football teams. The most important relationship in a man's life is with his best buddy. And it seems like the world is finally coming around to the realisation that the love between two heterosexual guys is the greatest love of all. A new movie, I Love You, Man, is the latest film to tackle the complexities of modern male bonding, daring to delve into the "man cave" and explore the murky world of the bromance.

What’s it about?

Paul Rudd plays Peter, a straight-laced guy who lacks that most vital male accessory: a best buddy. With his wedding just around the corner, he has to find a best man, so he embarks on a series of “man dates” to find Mr Right, with hilarious results. Eventually, he meets fun-loving slacker Sydney, his polar opposite, and the two hit it off right away. In fact, they get on so well that their “bromance” begins to threaten Peter’s relationship with his fiancée. He is faced with making a choice between his GF and his BF.

It's a no-brainer. You can always get a new fiancée, but a good buddy is irreplaceable.

I can’t reveal how it turns out, but I can say that, along the way, the movie explores that mysterious, indefinable force that draws two guys together over beer, fart jokes and the music of Rush.

Sounds like they've been struck by stupid's arrow.

Hollywood has been hooked on bromances ever since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid bonded over bullets and bullion. Sure, there was a female love interest, but it was only a sidebar to the central story: the bulletproof relationship between Paul Newman’s Butch and Robert Redford’s Sundance. Buddy movies have established the bromance in filmgoers’ consciousness – think Tango and Cash, Riggs and Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon movies and Goose and Maverick in Top Gun. Will Ferrell and John C Reilly are the Brangelina of bromance. The bromance has also been a staple of TV, from Starsky and Hutch to Kirk and Spock in Star Trek and Joey and Chandler in Friends. In the past decade, though, film-makers have been cranking up the bromantic intensity: check out Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings trilogy – that’s one serious bromance, my precious.

How do the ladies feel about all this rampant male bonding?

For years, women have been plotting ways to thwart our bromances, and they thought they’d won when we all turned into metrosexuals who didn’t mind missing the match to accompany them handbag-shopping. But Sex and the City changed all that.

How so?

When Carrie, Samantha and, er, the other two hit our screens, women rushed out to form girlie gangs and arrange shopping trips to New York, leaving guys free to go off and start bromances. While the girls were down at the bistro quaffing champagne and comparing orgasms, the guys were hanging out in second-hand record shops, going on stag weekends to Prague and inviting their mates back to the house to watch Borat. When Sex and the City’s final episode was aired, a million blokes cried, because they suspected their bromances would soon be coming to an end too.

Try at work:"There's just something about him . . . it's the way he can chug beer through his nostrils."

Try at home: "I'm looking for some commitment here, man – Rocky I or II?"