“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.”
-Moulin Rouge
I do not know much about love. I have never been in love but I imagine it feels similar to the way I feel about my favorite sundress, which I could happily wear every day for the rest of my life.
What I do know about love I learned from the outside looking in and most of that was watching movies.
Movies portray so many different sorts of love. Even action movies; Die Hard, Terminator, Braveheart, take the time to show pictures of love and romance. I spent my childhood learning what falling in love looked like from characters like Aladdin, Robin Hood, Cinderella, and Hercules. My teen and college years were spent with Heath Ledger, Will Smith, Hugh Grant, and Meg Ryan. Every one of them showing me what love was supposed to look like and, as a result, I grew up with a very specific idea of what meeting the love of my life would look like.
Much like Shakespearean tragedies, every romantic comedy has five distinct acts. Act One, in which we meet our star, a single lady in some sort of hopeless state. Her friends and family have either given up on her or taken matters into their own hands and started putting pictures of available men on her fridge. I am very fond of making the not-so-funny joke that I am Act One of any given romcom; the difference is that I am super satisfied alone in my apartment with my cat. Then comes Act Two, in which we meet the guy who is always dreamy and has great chemistry, but for whatever reason it can never work. Maybe he doesn’t believe in marriage or he is the groom in the wedding she is planning. Or maybe, from the outside, he seems like an immature jerk. In some movies, like When Harry Met Sally, it just cannot work because the timing always seems to be wrong and they are not ready to fall in love, which is how Act Three usually goes. They are not together even though they are obviously meant to be. In Act Four they are still not together and our leading lady is probably with the other guy. The guy who may be perfectly nice, but he is wrong. Meanwhile, our two main interests keep falling into each other’s lives and having pleasing chemistry. Finally, the audience reaches Act Five, in which the moment has come and the couple realizes that it whatever has been keeping them apart does not matter and, in a grand sweeping romantic gesture, they come together.
And credits roll because Hollywood does not want to show us how messy and complicated happily ever after can be.
I came into adulthood with that image of the process of falling in love. Sometimes a crush would not work out and I would think, “it’s okay, I’m just in Act Three.” Acts Four and Five never followed. I guess movies about compatibility and common interests just don’t grip the audience in quite the same way.
The “process of love” is not the only lesson I took away from years of watching “ideal” love stories play out on the silver screen. When I sat down to write this essay I sent out a text message to a few friends. The hopeless romantics sent back lists crammed full of sugary titles; Ever After, The Princess Bride, 10 Things I Hate About You, the romances filled with big gestures and sweet poetic lines. Those who were a little more jaded to the idea of love, at least those who had lost their rose-colored glasses along the way, sent very different responses.
“I don’t really watch those anymore. I used to love them! Now they are too cheesy and they made me believe that love was found those ways,” one friend told me. She went on to explain how different her own love story was and how she felt bad for several years because the two things did not look the same. Her fiance's big romantic gestures were much simpler, the kind that don’t translate well onto film. His big romantic gestures were small, things like getting her coffee on Saturday morning so she could sleep in and drink it in bed. My friends all cited moments in which their expectations of what romance and finding love looked like were impossible to meet, thanks to years of watching movies. They told me how they missed out on lovely things because they did not fit those expectations. No one stood in their yard with a boombox and the ones that might have were the wrong guys.
Expectations.
Expectations are brutal no matter the setting. When a movie I am excited to see comes out I never let my friends who have seen it tell me anything about it. I don't even want to hear if it was good. This was the best movie you’ve seen all year? Great! Shut up!I do not want to walk into that theater with those kinds of expectations. It has happened too many times that I have been disappointed in a film that was wonderful just because I had expected more. The same should be true of our romances. It is so easy when butterflies start fluttering in you stomach to imagine all of those things you will do with that person and the confessions of love that are sure to come.
Every one of those daydreams follows that well-learned five act RomCom script. No matter how sweet and charming your crush is HE CANNOT COMPETE WITH PRINCE CHARMING! He will never be able to live up to the script in my head, especially when I keep that script secret. Romantic relationships are not expertly written movies with award winning directors, they are improv shows. So I try to treat my crushes, the men who appear in my life that I am so excited about I can hardly help but think about them, the same way I treat movies I am excited about. When I find my mind wandering to those daydreams I shut them down. If I am going to experience a relationship with someone, I do not want to be disappointed with something wonderful because it does not match the expectations laid out in my secret script. As a writer, a daydreamer, and a woman who not only has to have a plan but a contingency plan for every possible situation, it is hard to stop myself from wandering down that path. Still, I try because I would rather know someone than dream about the perfect romantic gestures movies taught me to expect.
Expectations cause every manner of grief. I am only really disappointed when I have raised my expectations. And yes, romantic comedies and novels taught me to have high expectations but they are not all bad. Some of the most important lessons I learned about love I learned from movies.
“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love… true love never dies.”
-Hub, Secondhand Lions
Would we write story after story about love and make it into something worth believing in if it was not already something worth believing in? Secondhand Lions is not a love story. Not actually. Instead it is a movie about how important choosing to believe in something and care about something is in our lives. When love disappears from the character Hub’s life, he loses his hope in the world. He tells his young nephew about how for the next forty years there was always another war to fight until he became useless and resigned himself to fading away in obsolescence. Even in that hopeless state he continues to believe that true love never dies, not really, because it lives inside of him and because it is a worthwhile belief that makes him who he is.
The first and most important we should learn about love is that it is worth believing in . It does not matter if love is powerful or can last forever or change change us. We should believe in it because believing in it makes us better.
“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
-Wesley, The Princess Bride
The idea that nothing can stop true love is not a new one. We cling to the idea. True love can only be delayed, even by death. I am not certain how much I believe that but I do know that you do not stop loving someone simply because they die. That is why grief is so powerful. The love does not go away in the loss and pieces of your heart continue to ache for them.
I also know that when two people love each other and make the choice to love each other every day, that time and distance does not keep those two people apart. Time and distance does not stop true love, only delay it. There are some people who circle around each other throughout their lives, coming together and drifting apart. They draw to each other like magnets. When you choose to love someone and care about that person you draw back to each other. There might be bad timing and mistakes but those things do not stop true love.
What the movies do not tell you is that true love is not a feeling. True love is two people choosing what is best for the other person and choosing to love the other person every day.
“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
-Harry, When Harry Met Sally
Speaking of people who seem to circle around each other. The story of When Harry met Sally is one of a pair of soulmates who come in and out of each other’s lives until the moment they realize they are not only meant to be in each other’s lives but have to be in each other’s lives. When Harry realizes this he runs to Sally because when you realize you want to be with someone for the rest of your life you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
I have seen my fair share of love though and I have watched my friends fall in love. My friends will meet someone who, for whatever reason, is different than everyone else they have dated before. There is an instant, I’ve seen it, when they realize that person belongs in their life and they will do what it takes to be a part of their life. That moment when their eyes get wide and you can see their heart expand to hold all of the feelings buzzing through their body.
My friend Rebecca once told me the story of realizing she needed to be a part of her future true love’s life.
They had been texting from their apartments and realized that they wanted to see each other more and that they were less than a mile apart even though they had met in a completely different town and it made no sense that they would both have traveled to downtown Seattle to meet, but never saw each other in their own town. Rebecca put on her shoes and ran to his apartment. Ran because she needed to be with him.
I do not believe I have ever had the privilege of falling in love. When I do I will know it because I will need to be with that person and I hope I will be able to run to him just like Rebecca ran to her love. When Harry Met Sally was correct. When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
“Love is putting someone else’s needs before your own.”
-Olaf, Frozen
Romances taught me to expect big romantic gestures in my dating life. If a guy does not get up and serenade you with “A Whole New World” when you tell him Aladdin is your favorite Disney Movie, then you are probably not on a real date. However, romances also taught me that love is not always romantic. Some times love is a simple, straightforward, action.
The movie Frozen explained that love is not that sparkly butterfly feeling you get when you meet someone who charms you. It is thinking of someone else’s needs before your own. Love can be as simple as letting your loved one drive your car somewhere because the weather is supposed to be bad and your car has four wheel drive. Movies taught me that, above anything else, love is an action that we choose to take.
“You can’t leave everything to fate… she’s got a lot to do.”
-Davinci. Ever After
Just like love is an action, finding love is active. You can believe in Fate and believe there is a “one” all you want, but it will not matter if you take no action. It is so appropriate that this lesson came from a retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale. Critics of the classic Cinderella animated film call Cinderella a passive character. She is not. Fate and Destiny may have played a part in her love story with the prince, she still had to go to the ball to meet him, and the prince still had to search the entire kingdom for her. There may be a “one” out there for you, but you will never find him sitting alone in your apartment night after night.
You cannot leave everything up to Fate. Your actions and your choices matter. Sometimes you have to make a decision.
“Don’t choose the better guy. Choose the guy who makes you a better girl.”
-Trish, This Means War
I have learned a lot about love and what love looks like while watching movies. This is the most important. There are going to be guys who seem like the obvious choice. For whatever reason, he is “the better guy.” He is the smartest person in every room or the star athlete or makes the most money. He is the best, and don’t you deserve the best? Of course you do. You deserve the best person for you.
How does that guy who is so smart or handsome or whatever make you feel? Do you even like the person you are when you are with him?
Then there are guys that not everyone is going to understand the attraction. All eyes do not turn to him when he walks into a room... but yours do. Something about this less than charming prince changes you. He doesn’t make you into someone different, just someone better. You stretch him and he stretches you into the best versions of yourselves. That is the person you should be with, If you are faced with a choice, choose the person who is going to make you better.
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