exciting, informative, snarky, and very likely fabricated tales of life as an american expat in london

though our parts are slightly used

by Jen at 9:21 pm on 8.09.2009 | 2 Comments
filed under: mutterings and musings

if you were meeting your mate for the first time today, would you fall in love with them all over again? i mean, of course you would love them – the accumulation of shared experience and emotion through the years creates the kind of bonds that are hard to untangle. but would you fall in love with them? you being the person you are now, they being the person they have become, but both different than you were, in large part because of each other?

i ask because i saw (500) days of summer the other day. at first i was worried it might be just another manic pixie dream girl movie. the kind where the woman (in this case, “summer”) exists just to be an irrepressibly bubbly and eccentric muse to the male. and yes, it has certain cutesy elements of that kind of movie, but not overly so. and then when i began getting into it, i started to think that maybe the theme of the movie was about summer’s need to live life on her own terms and the lessons that it teaches the man (in this case, “tom”) about pursuing dreams. which it partly is as well – but that’s not really the point either.

and what we find in the end (and actually, what we’ve really known all along – as the narrator warns us in the first frame, “this is not a love story”), is that this story of a woman and a man is a modern variation on an old classic: unrequited love. or perhaps, not completely unrequited – because as the movie unfolds, we can see how in another time and another place, summer and tom might have had a future. summer and tom have the same taste in music. summer and tom have a similar quirky sense of humour. summer and tom tick all the right boxes, and even with the narrator’s warning in the back of our head, it’s both easy to forget and hard to understand how they don’t end up together. because they don’t. i’m not giving anything away in telling you that. but in spite of the warning, we the audience find ourselves getting sucked into seeing what we want to see in the relationship, much the way tom does. we assume that there’s a happy ending waiting for us, and so we frame everything we see through that lens.

the problem is, that in spite of all outward indicators of compatibility and romance, summer’s not in love. she sees clearly what tom cannot: they are not meant to be. for whatever reason, it’s just not going to work out, and no amount of wishing will change that. it’s a scenario that’s so relatable – we’ve all been there before, wearing our hearts on our sleeve, and it turns us inside out with the ache of it. we get caught up in thinking about what might have happened in an alternate universe where the pieces all click into place, and instead willfully ignore the painful reality of the mashed edges.

but in the movie, as in real life, we eventually learn that it’s only by letting go of the fantasy of what might have been, that we can allow space for someone new. finding someone with whom the stars align in the right sort of way to be a better fit than we could have ever imagined. an opportunity we might have overlooked if we were still wallowing in the place where the broken off relationship left us. the right person, in the right place, at the right time, appearing before us, and which we can only see when we have the clarity of experience.

which brings me back to my original question. because i have to wonder if part of finding the person you connect with, is also finding the person you don’t? the ability to move past the things that didn’t work out in order to be open to the one that does? can you really appreciate someone’s strengths (and vulnerabilities) without the benefit of hindsight?

in the unique triumvirate of right person/right place/right time that creates the possibility for a lasting and happy relationship, aren’t right place and right time just as important, (or perhaps even more so), than right person? and if so, wouldn’t meeting your spouse at a different place and time change the outcome and your future? in a reconfigured landscape, would we still recognise the one we love?

the narrator of the movie tells us, “this is not a love story”. but you know, it kind of is. after all, when so many of the circumstances that lead you to the right person – the one who fits, the one with no mashed edges, the one who *loves you back* – are left to the vagaries of fate… how could it be anything else?

us – regina spektor

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PSA: i’m off for a few weeks of holiday, so will see y’all when i get back!

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2 Comments

  • 1

    Comment by Amy

    9.09.2009 @ 02:20 am

    wonderful post, jen – - that resonated with me at just the right time, in just the right place.

  • 2

    Comment by A Free Man

    11.09.2009 @ 04:30 am

    Wow, good question. I don’t know. I’d like to think so. I do think so. But that being said, we met at the right place and the right time. I don’t know what would happen today.

    I saw an advert for this movie last night and thought it looked tempting.

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