500 Days Of Summer

I just came from seeing 500 Days of Summer. It was a great movie and I think they’ve definitely hit the new direction romantic comedies are headed. They’re now tragedies where, in the same vein of The Beak-up, the leading man and leading woman do not end up with one another.

There was a time when people wouldn’t want to see a movie like this. This movie was real. It breaks from romantic comedy formula and fortunately is hitting the theatres at a time when the country’s whole sense of formula in the real world (the economy, healthcare and joblessness) is shattered. We’re ready to accept a romantic comedy that’s filled with more pain than romance.

My friend recommended I see it. “It was like watching every relationship I’d ever been in” he said. Always up for a good emotional flagellation, I went…alone and came back to my boyfriend asleep in bed on a diagonal leaving no room for me. It was only 9:30 and I couldn’t help wonder if he purposefully wanted to be asleep when I arrived or if his sleeping on a diagonal was his unconscious mind pushing me out. I also thought, at least he made it into bed and didn’t just pass out on the couch the way he did the 2 nights before. And no, we’re not fighting and so I shouldn’t think anything of it. He wakes up early, his job is stressful, he’s tired. I get it.

But the movie did unearth the one thought, one fear in my head that new relationships are prone to; one that I am trying to push aside and prove otherwise by his conscious actions. What if he just feels differently about me in the morning?

In the movie, Tom tells Summer he’s ok with the no labels thing she needs to be comfortable in the relationship but that he needs some consistency from her; some assurance that she won’t feel differently about him one morning, simply because she does. She then responded with the truest and most depressing line in the movie. “But I can’t give you that. No one can.” UGH.

No legal document, no diamond ring and certainly no repeated professions of love can give you that. I’ve noticed that the older we get, the more baggage we acquire, the harder it is to feel secure with anyone. I’m not saying it’s hard to feel good, just hard to feel secure, where you don’t question the other’s feelings. Where you don’t question if he wanted to be asleep before you got home; where you don’t question if he thinks the two of you are on overkill even though he asked you to move in with him…and well now, only a few weeks after he asked you, living together just may seem like overkill.

All couples go through it. Wives can’t wait for their husbands to got to work to have some alone time while the kids are at school. Husbands try to squeeze in as much guy time as they can get away with and well, it’s normal. Maybe that morning their feelings changed, the things that bothered them about their partner became glaringly clear and space was needed. But that’s not to say that the next morning or one morning the next week he won’t pull her close for a cuddle because he returned to his normal state of loving her.

I used to believe in the one. At this moment I think I believe in no one, no destiny, no meant to be. And the insanity is that I want there to be one. I want the fairy tale that has my name on it. Where the guy I’m with feels that I was made just for him as I feel he was made just for me. Crazy…maybe. Childish and naïve…sure. But do not be deceived by my own need for distorted emotional outpouring on the keystrokes. The film does end on a hopeful note and does try to restore order to the disorder it spent an approximately well conceived, cleverly written 95 pages creating. But even so, as I try to sleep on the couch, I can’t get the thought that my boyfriend wanted to be asleep before I got home out of my head.