Our Love Is Bigger Than The Movies

We fight a lot. I think that’s your biggest complaint about falling in love with me — I am stubborn and loud and proud of what I believe in, which you adored at first. I think you still admire it, but I can tell it frustrates you when we can’t see eye-to-eye and we just end up yelling at one another.

Sometimes I think that maybe there’s a problem here. I don’t know if relationships are supposed to be so bumpy, so up-and-down and on-and-off and everywhere in between. I try my best to navigate it but god, I grow so tired. Sometimes I worry this isn’t what I spent all my life dreaming about. Sometimes I worry that this isn’t the love I was told I’d have.

I grew up watching movies about love. I was the little girl who wrote stories about the day that I would someday meet you, who listened to songs and imagined what you’d look like. When I fell in love, what would I be wearing? What would I say? Would it be like a Disney movie, where you save me from the bad guys and usher me into our happily ever after? Would it be like The Notebook, where we argue at first but slowly realize we’re falling in love?

But the truth is that love never came like that. Our story wasn’t like any of the ones I used to dream about as a kid; it wasn’t like the ones I scribbled in old notebooks I found in my father’s desk. Our story wasn’t beautifully written, and the set design was mediocre, and the cinematography was subpar at best. We will win no Oscars; no little girl will stay up late at night to watch our story unfold.

We are not the love story meant for a screen. We don’t have one succinct plot but many confusing, convoluted storylines that tangle together and disconnect and hardly make any sense at all. We have conflicts that are never resolved and dialogue that hardly makes sense and metaphors that aren’t quite fully fleshed out. We are not the couple people root for, not the one filmmakers write sequels about, not the one worthy of pop culture references and cult classic followings.

But darling, our love is bigger than the movies. It is something that can’t be captured on camera, one that can not be stuffed into a two-hour reel of film. We may not be vibrant hues or swoon-worthy confessions, but we are real, and we are messy, and we are something more than Hollywood can handle. We are the characters that never made it to the big screen, but I’m happy about it, because I don’t think anyone else could do us justice. We deserve something better than cliches and sappy music. We deserve explosive arguments and boring evenings and funny conversations and blissful, quiet moments when we are left alone. We deserve the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, the fights and the makeups and every moment in between.

We are not Ally and Noah, or Jack and Rose, or Harry and Sally. We don’t have a happily ever after, no promised ending, no kiss in the sunset as the screen fades to black. But we do have a future, and it’s bright, and I’m happy I get to write every moment with you.