re: love

i finally watched materialists (about a thousand years late, i know). it was one of those movies that once it ended, i immediately hated. rolling my eyes throughout the entire thing, it was pretty predictable. but then it ended, and for days after, i couldn’t get that movie out of my head. the dialogue (as long winded as it was at times) tackled the age old trope of “for love or money?” in a simple, soft and oh so painfully accurate way.

marriage at its core is a business decision, so the challenges we face when reconciling love and marriage (the impossible choice between chris evans and pedro pascal) are inevitable because the two are inherently incompatible. and that isn’t me being pessimistic or unromantic. it’s just is the inconvenient truth nobody wants to hear. dakota johnson’s character says it best: she doesn’t have a kingdom to unite, nor does her family need a cow to get them through winter. so why get married?

we (as most normal, modern, middle class people) don’t actually have much reason to necessitate marriage anymore, and yet the construct prevails. it remains the gold standard, the light at the end of the tunnel, the thing they promise once you achieve, then you’ll be happy. we equate love and marriage, and i think that to do so is to limit the notion of love itself.

i love love in its many forms - but i wish we celebrated all love (platonic, familial, even the most fleeting connection with a person you meet once then never see again) as much as we do romantic. there are so many unique and beautiful variations of love in this world, that to champion one is to discount the rest. that love you feel when your best friend flies across the country to stand by your side on your wedding day deserves to be commended, celebrated, and cherished just as much as the person standing beside you saying i do.

the concept of “true love” also bothers me, because what makes it true? is it how long you’ve loved someone, or how hurt you were once they were no longer in your life? true implies a dishonest alternative, which i don’t think actually exists. why bother trying to put boundaries around love - give rules and regulations around what counts vs what doesn’t? you know that embarrassing moment when you’re finishing up a work call and you sign off with “ok love you bye!” we call it an accident, but what is love if not a reflex? love isn’t logical, it’s instinctual, and it bubbles up in the quietest, most mundane of moments.

we try to quantify and qualify love, tie it to arbitrary measurements and constructs like closeness or time or marriage, because maybe it helps us put logic to the illogical. to quote love actually, real love (pure love) is really, all around. because when my dry cleaner somehow magically gets all the red wine out of my white dress and still slips a discount just because - you better believe i’m telling that man “omg i LOVE you!” and mean it.