This Is What Makes A Good Love Story

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Let’s see. Earlier, I finished a book by Stephanie Perkins. The book is about Anna Oliphant who was exiled to Paris for the whole duration of her senior year in high school. In Paris, she got acquainted with everything that’s French – Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Champs-Élysées, Jardin du Luxembourg, opera singers, French coffee, the countless movie houses, wishing fountains, Seine River, French boys, and the list goes on.

There, she met the American/English/French handsome man-of-every-girls’-dreams, Étienne St. Clair. The both of them find themselves pulled into each other’s gravity, both of them find their selves attracted into their own differences, both of them braking the rules of love and both of them find themselves falling in and out of love.

In between all these attractions, they’ve both fought hard not to fall for the magnetic pull because a lot is at stake. However, both of them found their selves enjoying the City of Love – they both created a story of heartbreaks in between falling in and hoping to find love.

At the end, they both find that home is not often a place people share. Sometimes, home is the two hearts that found themselves beating as one.

Much earlier than that, I finished watching a Filipino film about a love triangle among three adults whose lives got intertwined because of confusion and heartbreaks and finding what true love is. I think that the central questions in the story were (1) how and when do we know that love is worth fighting for; (2) how do we know that we love that person and how do we know we are not making a wrong choice; and (3) should love be based on principles and right decisions and not purely on emotions?

What connects there two stories is the journey to finding happiness which is brought the decision we made to find that actual happiness. In high school, we got so engrossed with the idea of being in love; we find that we love that person because he gave you flowers, we say we love that person because he walked you home, we love that person because she said yes when you are so sure that she will give you the ultimate no; we say we love that person because he/she reciprocated what you feel.

That was how mundane we defined and looked at love that when we spot a single flaw, our immediate response is a blaring sign that reads “turn off.”

But as we grow old, these definitions and perceptions change. We find ourselves looking at love from a different perspective, thus, we make decisions that we know might hurt us but once rationalized, we know that will make us happy on the long run.

As we grow old, the nuances between each other is what we try to accept. We try to match those nuances because those are the hard things to work on to in any relationship we build. We accept why he loves brewed coffee instead of a caramel latte, we accept that she goes to libraries and you go to the gym, we accept that he smokes and you don’t, we accept that she likes long walks, we accept that he likes to just read books and not talk, we accept she prefers sunny-side-up instead of scrambled eggs; more importantly, we accept the past and use it as an advantage for the future.

Those are decisions that other people might not understand, other people might not reconcile and accept, but we chose to ignore them because somewhere, on the blueprint we created, we found that accepting these nuances will make the whole thing work and grow.

And to me, that makes a good love story. There will be heartbreaks and difficulties, but there will also be Friday night dates, vanilla sex, sweet sunset talks, hot coffee in the morning, good music, and good company. And somehow, that is everything