Most romance movies seem so shallow.  Maybe my immersion in Buddhism has shifted my perspective.  Whatever it is, when I watch a romance movie, it seems as though it’s all happening on another planet.  I can’t understand why anyone focuses so much on getting another person to play out their daydreams when they could just love them!  Is anybody loving anyone anymore?

Society seems to have lost touch with something deeper, as though the concept of real love is slipping through everyone’s fingers, and we’re forgetting what it feels like.  Forgetting how deeply fulfilling it is just to contemplate someone, caring about what happens to them, and not think so much about the script or whether they’re being what we want.  I mean, where do the daydreams go anyway?  Not particularly far.  On to bigger and better daydreams, often with someone else.  The daydreams outgrow the people who fulfill them.

Now we are more like shoppers.  Romantic partner consumers.  Bleh.  Like junk food.  Like the guy in Super Size Me who quickly becomes anxious and depressed and addicted to Big Macs, which are slowly killing him.

Last night I watched the movie, 500 Days of Summer, a highly amusing, sophisticated modern romance.  Definitely not junk food, although I still felt a lack of connection with it.  Much of the drama was very familiar to me, but it didn’t resonate with me.  When I was dating a sociology student, I was always frustrated at getting pulled into dramas that didn’t match me inside at all.  I just wanted to care about him, but the push towards traditional romantic partnership was so engrossing, his felt connection with me would dissolve anytime he decided against such a path.

Then, he would see me again and feel an overwhelming, confusing warmth that would compel him to puruse the fantasy of partnership again.  Black or white.  On or off.  Either the love meant that partnership was in the cards, or it wasn’t real.

In the realm of love, we want something we can sink our teeth into.  When there is no explanation, no manner in which it manifests, and no physical sign we can point to and say “that is love,” and especially when common routes of expression are impeded, we cannot wrap our minds around it, and so we abandon it.

Unconditional love is a mindjob–but it’s not for the mind, anyway.

The more confused you are, the better.

I would love to see a romance movie where the two characters move through life (or lives) and just focus on one another’s well being… again and again, from situation to situation, acting in whatever way is called for, even if it means not being in a particular social arrangment.  There is a tiny hint of that sort of love in the final scenes of many movies where a crush goes unrequited or a relationship falls apart, and the two people are left with no other option than to just wish each other well.  Then the movie ends!

Alas, the movie could start right there.

Here it is, the most beautiful love scene ever: