What Love Life Shows About How Love Affects People
The moral case for finding yourself before finding someone else to love.
People do crazy things for love.
Or at least what they believe to be love. They make all kinds of decisions they otherwise wouldn't just to try and find the person we think will make us feel complete. All in pursuit of that thing we call love. Because love is seen as something we want and in some cases really need. There are even entire industries dedicated to the idea, in theory, that we can find them. Of course as anyone who has ever actually looked for love knows, it's not exactly very easy to do. It takes a lot of time and effort to find that person. Usually because we're not even sure who we are, let alone the type of person who would make us feel as those who have what we want. For a lot of people, it leaves us with a sense of uncertainty and incompleteness that we can't really find a way to shake. We're so focused on the end goal of finding the one we're supposed to be with, we miss the obvious.
Rather than focusing on that person, it's better to focus on what it is about ourselves that makes us feel as though we're not worthy of such a thing. Examine what lead you to that point in the first place. How your relationships with your parents, siblings and even friends have made you who you are. They've all contributed in some way to the way in which you came to think about love and the person you're supposed to be with. When you do, it becomes easier to see how you've gone wrong in either the relationship you're currently in or who you might one day find. Finding love isn't about the other person then, it's about you.
Love is not an end goal, it's a journey. A process you go through in order to see yourself in a better light and ultimately find what works for you. While the person you might ultimately end up with can help you along that journey and hopefully they have a positive impact, it's far from certain that it will do what you need. After all, introspection and really looking back at your life is extremely painful. You might end up learning things about yourself that you didn't want to know. See some aspect of how you participated in the end of a relationship that you weren't expecting. Lots of people don't want to do that type of work.
Love Life is about how difficult the process of finding love can be, both in yourself and in the person you end up with. Darby and Marcus, as played brilliantly by Anna Kendrick and William Jackson Harper, both go through their own journeys of self discovery. At many points in following their stories, it's extremely painful to watch. Not all of it works out in their favour. More often than not, they make all kinds of bad decisions born in part from their own insecurities brought on by their past relationships. Yet they learn from those experiences and who they could be.
Go on the journey by checking out Love Life as soon as you can.
You can find Love Life on HBO Max and Crave in Canada.