But, plot twist incoming bigger than Bruce Willis realising he is a ghost (soz, spoiler alert there, although it’s so obvious guys come on, get your critical thinking hats on and you’ll clock this in about 30 mins of watching) and I’ve never uttered these words before but…
the “happy ending” is also always my least favourite part.
Eeeeeeesssssshhhhhh. Just letting that simmer for a moment in the room. But God, it feels good to say that out loud though. My name is Rianna and I hate the happy endings in rom coms. I’ll be stood outside someone’s house in a minute with a boom box blaring and me shouting this up to the poor stranger’s window. Now that’s a rom-com I’d watch.
“Why”? I hear all three of you say. Is it because I’ve turned into a cynic in my old age? Possibly. Is it because that’s the part I can’t relate too? Harsh. But also, completely accurate. Or is it because, for most of us anyway, this part just isn’t real life. And look, I know we watch film and television to escape from the mundaneness of the everyday. That, after all, is one of the reasons why many of us love watching movies and to binge series. But I think we also enjoy it because we see ourselves in the characters on our screens, we see our experiences and lives laid out before us in glaring HD, with just much better-looking people living them. So, when I see those end credits roll I can’t help but feel a little…hollow.
Which is why I truly love, all the way down into my soul, another sub category within the “romance genre” which I like to call the “Punch you in the gut, snotty tears falling down your face, possibly need to bring this up in your next therapy session, no happy endings just real life” rom-com movies. There are still always some funny bits in them. I like to LOL too, I’m not a complete psychopath.
Last weekend I went to see the last instalment (booo) of the Bridget Jones story and without spoiling it how I have The Sixth Sense above, I will just say, take your tissues and its fucking brilliant. 10/10, no notes.
It’s of course still the same old classic Bridget that we all know and love but this time it’s not only a story of love. Or of them having us believe that 135lbs is fat.
It’s a story of grief, loss, new beginnings, messy middles and chapters closing. It truly was a balm for the soul. Especially as I am now in my thirties, which is the same decade that we met Bridget in for the first time all those years ago. I grew up on Bridget Jones movies as both my Mum and Nan are huge fans and I always felt this great sense of admiration for her. She tried so desperately hard to fit in and change herself for society but she then had the courage to say, ‘fuck this” and just be herself. Flaws and all. And then knowing that the whole world fell in love with her “just as she is” was a very comforting thing to see on screen as a girl…and as a woman too!
Okay, tiny spoiler coming up (really sorry) but the main reason why I think it’s the best film of the whole franchise is because…Bridget doesn’t get the OG happy ending that she deserved. We rooted for her the whole way through to be happy, to be loved, to be with the ‘right one’ and she, eventually, got it…but only for a little while. I’m welling up again just thinking about it.
(Sorry again but tiny interlude to just say- LEO WOODALL THE MAN YOU ARE, FACE, THAT BOD, THAT HAIR, THAT VOICE, THAT SLIGHTLY LAZY EYE THAT LOOKS LIKE HE IS WINKING…please pass on my sincere “well done” to your parents because that shit is phenomenal work. You know he's something because he's a blondie and its takes something very special to get me to fancy a blonde. Interlude over)
And that’s life isn’t? That right there. The inexplicable, painful truth of reality, that sometimes we really do just get a season of the good stuff and not everything that’s “perfect” will stay forever.
But things don’t have to be forever to be good...
I have two all-time favourites “Punch you in the gut, snotty tears falling down your face, possibly need to bring this up in your next therapy session, no happy endings just real life” rom-com works of art. “La La Land” & “One Day”. Which I probably could argue they should also be part of the horror genre too as the way I took a vicious intake of breath at the last minute of La La Land on my first watch would equally match the pure shitting of one’s self when I watched The Exorcist at 11 years old.
Both “Dexter and Emma” and “Seb and Mia” are soulmates. And I’ll be taking no other opinions on that. Yet both end up apart at the very end. Dexter and Emma’s string is heartbreakingly cut by death and Seb and Mia’s snipped by the different journey’s they both must take. Also, heart-breaking actually.
For the sake of this piece I will talk about Dext and Em (Leo also plays Dexter in the series and obvs as he has found himself back in my frontal lobe after seeing him be an absolute dreamboat/sex god/slight red flag last Saturday evening…it’s been a VERY nice few days).
For those of you who haven’t seen or read One Day (yeah this bad boy gives you three ways to shed a violent amount of tears) I’ll give you a quick rundown so you don’t have to traumatise yourself:
“One Day” tells the story of Dexter and Emma, who meet on July 15th(St Swithin’s Day) each year after graduating from university. The story follows them over the next two decades and we see how their lives intertwine through friendship, love, oppourtunites, heartbreak and the challenges of growing up. As they confront their feelings and life choices the story beautifully explores how time can change everything, yet some connections remain timeless”.
Yeah, it’s as soul destroying as you think it could be. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think I’ll ever emotionally recover from it either. The series was released just over a year ago now and every time I hear this one song from the show I get goosebumps and the feeling that I get is unmatched (even to Cynthia’s version of ‘Defying Gravity’ and we ALL know what that does to me). And it’s the only series that has ever showed so clearly how much ego gets in the way of going after what, and who, you want in life.
Emma and Dexter are two polar opposites that really shouldn’t work together. Emma is from a working-class family, very intelligent, a pretty but not conventionally “beautiful” girl (by Hollywood or society’s standards), she’s deadpan, vulnerable, witty and above all has a complete yearning for her best friend for years. Dexter however is ridiculously handsome (the gaggle of doe-eyed women that always surround him cement that in from the opening episode) rich and dreams of being rich and famous- he’s also very lost, slightly cruel but awfully forgivable too.
One of my favourite lines in the show is when Emma says:
“It’s one of great cosmic mysteries how it is that someone can go from being a total stranger to being the most important person in your life”.
And you know what Em, I agree, I think it truly is baffling.
So do soulmates exist?
I don’t know. Sometimes the universe seems to fight so hard to bring two souls together that it does make me wonder if we all are put on this earth and have this invisible string attached to each other but maybe that’s the inner romantic in me. In Greek mythology, it’s said that once upon a time humans were whole. They had four arms, four legs and two faces (a trait that some still seem to have…soz, I’m not here to be a bitch today, back to love). The two souls fused together into one. However, the gods feared the power of humans, they feared their courage, their hope and the strength that they now had. So, Zeus, king of the Gods (and with his all-round tiny dick energy) created a plan to split the humans in half so they would be filled with despair, loneliness and longing. They would go for days without moving, sleeping and eating and eventually they learned that they had to live with it, broken shells of humans, forever wandering along to find their soulmate. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Although I’d pick a big tub of Ben and Jerry’s to go alongside the moping but not sure the ancient Greeks had access to a “Big Tesco” to get the clubcard price of a B&J Cookie Dough family size tub?
Emma and Dexter first meet when he’s trying to get into her knickers after their graduation ball but is slightly perplexed by Emma’s unwillingness to get straight to it. She puts on her music and wants to actually talk to this brand-new person she’s just met, what a strange idea! They end up not having sex and instead the next day they take a hike up to Arthur’s seat together where Emma says that she doesn’t want to be a “footnote” in Dexter’s life. That she’d rather they be friends and be in his life than not at all. And there starts the next two decades of their lives intertwining with each other.
It’s obvious to everyone, besides themselves, that they both are in love with each other over the next twenty years (in all the different capacity’s that love can come in). They have their ups, their downs, the years where they don’t even speak, not even on St Swithin’s Day- they have other loves, affairs, marriages, babies and their own lives that they live. But there is always this invisible force that keeps bringing them back together. There is a cleverness to the series, that the film never quite manages to have, that we watch them reconnect having witnessed their own individual stories more intimately than they ever did themselves. It’s as if we’re the only ones who ever know their real story.
Eventually after many years of back and forth they FINALLY do get together. And probably the only time in their lives that they could have too. They both had grown so much as people, different perspectives, experiences and even more love between the two of them than they ever could have dreamed of having all those years. It’s a happy few years that we then see of Dexter and Emma navigating through their next chapters together and this is where normally these things finish right? Wrong. What happens next, on a rainy St Swithin’s Day, is the most tragic, harrowing and somewhat poignant ending we could ever have.
It’s perfect. Until it isn’t.
But is that such a bad, terrible, failure?
We put so much effort and are constantly being told that love needs to be forever. We are subtly pushed to fixate, from the start, about carrying on our family names, buying things that will last a lifetime, finding the one. But really, not everything has to be forever. And sometimes things have to end for both reasons within and without of our control. And that’s not only fine, but it’s also a part of life (and I feel I’m finally coming to terms and at peace with this now).
I’ve had a fair few friendships end for no particular reason other than we just drifted away from each other, we turned into different people with different paths we had to take. I’ve had relationships that I thought would last forever only for them to then disappear into nothingness. People do grow apart, life happens and that’s okay because things don’t have to be forever to be good. The most vital thing is that we get value, enjoyment and happiness out of it. If something isn’t adding value to your life, is draining you, leaving you unhappy you are well within your rights to end it, like it’s okay…nothing truly bad will happen, I promise. But also, if something does truly bad happen, for legal reasons, I take no responsibility and you can’t sue me for my handbag and shoe collection.
Of course, there is love that lasts a lifetime and more and it’s something we should all hope for, its magic and its beautiful but it’s also alright if that doesn’t happen too. Just because something ends after a few years doesn’t make it lesser than and just because something has lasted decades doesn’t make it greater than. Heck I know couples who have been together for ages and are utterly miserable with their existence and I also know couples who had been together for less than 3 months and ended up with the house, the baby and the happiness too! Look at Dexter and Emma, they only had a brief amount of time together as the “dream couple” but in that short time they were so happy.
I’m always coming back to the line in the “Sunscreen Song” that says:
“Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t,
maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t,
maybe you’ll divorce at 40,
maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…
what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much
or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance,
so are everybody else’s”
I’m choosing now to take the lesson of “live for everyday” from One Day. Tell people you love them, ask them out on that date, talk to your family and friends, try a new hobby, go for that opportunity, move to that other city, get out of bed every day and realise what a privilege that actually is. I want to put my phone down more, I want to read more and scroll less, I want to live and I want to enjoy my life. Alone or with someone who joins me on the way, for however long. Because that’s the real life ending I think. Just be content, healthy and above all, happy.
I’ll leave this ramble with my favourite paragraph from David Nicholls’ book version of ‘One Day” and I’m going to do my best at the following:
“Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at…something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance”.
xoxo
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