On love, marriage, and Blue Valentine

My brother got married a couple of days ago. I thought it fitting to revisit something I wrote back in February about love and marriage. Jump to the end for a quick note about the contrast in my experience.

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Today I watched Blue Valentine, a film about falling in—and out of—love. It tells the highs and lows of love; the way that it can both come and go in a day, a week, a month. I was touched by the raw beauty of the couple's entanglement. It wasn't hopeful, nor cynical; just real.

It makes me wonder if true love is meant to be fast, ensnaring you just as quickly as it later releases you—only with heartfelt wonderment rather than gut-wrenching pain. Early in the film, the lead male character, Dean, states that he simply isn't going to die; the couple soon seem equally sure their love will never die. But it does—brutally, passionately, and recklessly.
You always hurt the one you love—sung remarkably (and surprisingly) well by Dean (Ryan Gosling)—is the somewhat-haunting theme of the movie. But must this be true? Must love wither and die just as it earlier blossoms and blooms? And why must something so simple and pure leave such a tangled, broken mess in its wake?

A few days ago I saw someone post on Twitter that, thanks to Blue Valentine, they're "never getting married." That's understandable—the devastating juxtaposition between the couple's courtship and their split, which are shown in parallel, throws a blanket over the idea that love is forever, and that true love is priceless. I walked out of the cinema thinking, for the first time in my life, that not only is nothing forever, but love—even, or perhaps especially, in its purest, rawest, most intense form—is fleeting, fragile, and ultimately bleak.

Yet I still want it. Call me a masochist, but I'll take the utter despair, the simultaneously beautiful and ugly devastation of a rapidly disintegrating love, if it may be preceded by the life-affirming, uncomplicated ecstasy of finding that love in the first place. If all intimacy must be inevitably shattered, so be it. Maybe it's not as simple as, "Just don't die." But unlike Dean, I never expected it to be.

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I came away from Simon and Rachel’s wedding feeling very different to how I walked out of the cinema after watching Blue Valentine. Where Blue Valentine seemed to paint love as ecstatic but ultimately bleak, the impression I got from the wedding is that it doesn’t have to be that way. In the most sincere display of collective love I’ve seen, everyone seemed to be in consensus that Simon and Rachel have what it takes to go all the distance together—that their love will never die because their bond is so strong and true.

Love can be forever. At least I hope so.