The Vow

As you may have gathered from the title, I just watched the movie The Vow. Let me just say that the amount of thinking this has caused me to do is exactly what makes me love and adore theatre more than anything! The basic plot of the movie is that a man and his wife get into a car accident and the girl (who's name I completely forget unsurprisingly) loses her memory of all of the time she has ever known her husband. So the movie is mostly him trying to get her to fall in love with him again. I really loved that it wasn't just all him being sappy and lovey dovey and it just all being okay. She doesn't remember him and he knows everything about her. And he can't just tell her because she's scared and doesn't know what her life is. He can't freak her out more and she can't love the guy that she's supposed to love. But he kept it up. He did absolutely everything he could think of and more to remind her why she loved him. He gave up everything that he had to try and win her back. He had to give up living with her, kissing her, saying he loves her. I can't even imagine what that would be like and I just saw it! There's a bit of a plot twist at the end, which I won't give away, but basically he knows something that she doesn't, and she finds out and asks him why he didn't tell her. And the reason is because he wanted her to be happy even more than he wanted her to love him back. He did give everything he had for her. And the most powerful part of the movie for me was when he recognized that he wasn't what she needed right then, and let her go. He loved her so much that he gave up her love for him just so she could be happy.
And now the thinking part! Watching pretty much any piece of theatre is cause for the question, "What would I do in that situation?" And the frustrating discovery that I would have given up long before him. That I want to be loved so bad that I would maybe destroy something else. The terrible discovery that I don't love as fiercely as this character. That I still don't really know what love is. That I still don't know how to love. And the realization that I am still so selfish. I've always known it, but I just keep ending up back at it. I'm so focused on myself all the time. Even when I Do something unselfish I still Think that I would have liked the other option. I very often just do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because I want to. Not even because I want to be good or do the right thing. I just do it. Why does that make sense and not make any sense? I guess what I've learned from this movie is that I have a lot to learn about love. And it is a reinforcement that love really does exist. I've seen it, and some day I'll figure out how to truly love. Here's to that day! Good night.