Waking up

Love is something that makes you wake up in the morning, not something you wake up and realize you're in. That's my way of lookin' at it.

We've watched two movies over the past week that seem to go against this idea. It isn't really a tough one to grasp, but it seems it's not a very popular idea to have. I'm guilty of renting or even buying the occasional sappy movie; there's something about watching people "fall in love" that makes most of us feel like our soul just got a warm cozy bath after spending a long day outside in the cold. But sometimes reality isn't cold, sometimes it's actually better than what a screenwriter can put together.

So after watching these two movies, which will remain nameless because there are many films like 'em out there, I actually felt like I was the lucky one. I didn't feel a pang of loneliness set in when the credits began to roll.

Why?

Because both of these films depict love as some kind of thing that people sort of end up with coincidentally, if they're lucky -- like winning the lottery, almost (and it certainly isn't that). They wake up and, suddenly (Really? Suddenly?), the world is right. In the film, it finally occurs to the actor that they've been dating their soul mate for 10 years, so it's okay to get married, they guess. The character spent their life looking for this someone, and, somehow, they blindly dated so many wrong someones for so long (thinking they were "the one, maybe" the whole time!). It's an exhausting process. Their collection of broken hearts makes Beanie Baby collectors look like they shouldn't be ashamed of having spent so much money on products that no one cares about any more. Harsh? Well, that's pretty much what happens in some of these films.

So how is reality better than this? Thankfully, real love isn't some thing. What we know as human love is actually the outline of God's shadow. We haven't seen him, so don't know what perfect love looks like, exactly, but we have an idea of what it is. When we catch a glimpse of that love in someone else, just a shadow of his love, we're attracted to it. It's as natural as breathing.

We're all wired to love and want to receive love; anyone who denies this has been hurt before -- there's no denying that. I truly believe you can't be unsure of love because when it's sincere, it's obvious. It's the pink elephant in the room, minus the awkwardness and negative associations usually held with the term. Still, someone could say it might take a person awhile to realize its existence in their life, and that would be true, but that doesn't change the fact that it was already there from the beginning.

So it seems the only time I saw any semblance of love in these two films was at the end. No, not when the characters acknowledged they were "in love", but after that. During the rolling of the credits. White words against a solid black background, moving down a screen right before our eyes. Love is that obvious.