What a beautiful movie, and it was so good for me to watch it again and see the difference in where I am from a couple of years ago (see my post after I watched it back in January of 2013). In the movie, the main character is still in love with his wife even after she cheated on him and wanted out of their marriage. The movie is about his heartbreak but also about how he rebuilds himself and falls in love with someone else (someone who it would not be hard to fall in love with, my fave, Jennifer Lawrence). When I saw it the first time, I cried and cried. Watching it again, I remember the sheer agony I felt the winter before last. I also remember the friend I watched it with asking me if I knew why it struck me so hard. As I recall, the best I could come up with was that to see them -- the new lovers -- in a position to embrace their love and not be in that position with my own lover felt so unfair.
Now I understand on a deeper level what those tears were about. Some part of me probably knew then what I can see clearly now -- my boyfriend and I were not the new lovers who found each other at a time in both of their lives where they were open to starting something together that could go on and on -- we were -- or should I say I was -- more like the main character at the start of the movie, still desperately in love with someone who, by his actions, had shown that he wasn't able to embrace a life with me. I didn't want to admit it for so long, that though we had been those lovers in the position to take on the world together, we actually only inhabited that place for a fraction of the time we spent together. Much of the rest of it was me holding on for dear life, clinging to what I believed could be.
That belief was enough for a long time, until I started to heal, and want more for myself. And even then, it took me a few more months to recognize that I couldn't force someone to give me what I wanted, not even by identifying it and mapping out a brilliant plan to bring us to fruition. That didn't work. It didn't work because I can only control myself. I can't control him. Even if he, on some level, wants to do the work. Even if he does love me, and want to be with me. Those things just aren't enough. He would have had to be able to take action, and continue to take action, to move himself and us back in that direction, and he either couldn't or wouldn't.
Sigh. But at least the picture is getting clearer for me. I don't love him any less, but I do love myself more, and that means expecting more out of life than to mire myself in a cycle of ecstasy and frustration from trying to change the man I happen to be crazy about who can't or won't deliver on my basic needs in a romantic partnership.
Pondering all of this, I heard Regina Spektor's song about letting go of a love, and it seemed to be expressing what I was feeling pretty darn perfectly:
I never loved nobody fully
Always one foot on the ground
And by protecting my heart truly
I got lost in the sounds
I hear in my mind
All these voices
I hear in my mind all these words
I hear in my mind all this music
And it breaks my heart
And it breaks my heart
And it breaks my heart
It breaks my heart
And suppose I never ever met you
Suppose we never fell in love
Suppose I never ever let you kiss me so sweet and so soft
Suppose I never ever saw you
Suppose we never ever called
Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my own fall
Just to break my fall
Just to break my fall
Break my fall
Break my fall
All my friends say that of course its gonna get better
Gonna get better
Better better better better
Better better better
Yes, my friends, you are right. It's gonna get better. It's already starting to...
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