Friday night I did what I always do – watched a movie. I do it all the time for reasons that I don’t know, even though I did so by myself this time (and, to be fair, the last few hundred times probably) but this time the movie brought upon me an epiphany. I want to share…
The movie that I watched this time was Chasing Amy, a movie I’d seen many times before but for some reason had never gotten. Usually I view it as a story of what can happen when friends try to move beyond friendship into something more and also about the importance of truth in a relationship, but this time it dawned on me that that wasn’t it at all. It’s about more than that, something simpler than that. It’s about love. True love.
The whole story lends itself pretty easily to my original conclusion just in the way that Kevin Smith wrote in the entire plot of a lesbian and a guy becoming good friends only to have the guy announce his love to her and stuff happening as a result. The premise flows naturally into the issue of truth as the girl involved had had many experiences in life that she hadn’t shared and he, of course, eventually finds out about them and everything crumbles apart. I don’t know why I’ve always thought that that was all that drew me to it.
What I realized this time was that Kevin Smith was telling a story about how it doesn’t matter what happened in the past of the person you love. It doesn’t matter that two people don’t share the same experiences in the past. What matters are the present and the future. What matters are the experiences that two people in love share with each other. Everything else is null and void.
Maybe that’s the only aspect of life where that is the truly the case, but it is something that I think I’ve grasped in the last few years that I don’t think a lot of other people really have. And maybe it’s because I’ve grasped them that I never really saw that before…I don’t know. You see, I’m not very experienced in sex and love to tell you the truth and pretty much every girl that I come across in life is much more experienced that me – had more “adventures” if you will. That used to bother me…I used to look only for girls that had the same or less experience than me, never finding them, instead finding awesome girls that had had some, or much more than me. That bothered me.
I guess things started to change for me when I fell in love a few years back…with a girl that was an ex-cocaine addict and a more-or-less alcoholic that was not quite virginal. Somehow, none of that mattered to me even though I thought it should because, frankly, I was feeling quite inadequate and very naïve in the time that I was with her. Those were demons that I chased when she wasn’t around however, when I was with her they weren’t there at all.
Before then I was a twenty-year-old virgin who had never had more than a single drink and had never even thought of doing drugs (or, it might be the case, been around them). I believed most highly in never involving myself with a girl that wasn’t a virgin herself, a girl who drank, or a girl who did drugs. But somehow all of that subsided with her…as I did a little Amy-chasing myself.
And through the years that followed I learned the lesson over and over again as I kept finding girls that were interesting to me and yet were much more world-experienced than I was…each time figuring out that those experiences didn’t matter as much as I thought maybe they did. No, as time went on I realized that what did matter, the only thing that mattered was that I was interested in her and she in me…in the here and now…and that that interest was allowed to blossom itself into love. The past was irrelevant.
And now, today, as I write this, I can honestly say that I believe that. Not too long ago I had a conversation about sex and love and marriage and when the person I was talking to asked me if I could ever marry a girl with more experience than me I said “I don’t care”.
And it was, for some reason, bothering me today as I thought about that conversation (as something I saw on TV reminded me of another part of it). Did I believe that? Is it wrong for me to not care? Am I just leaving myself out in the wide open because I don’t want to exclude any chances? And the answers, in order are no, no, and no. I just honestly believe that if you love someone, what that person has done (and with who) is completely irrelevant (except, perhaps, in terms of STDs) to what you and that person are currently doing and what you will do in the time you have together – whether it’s a month, a year, or a lifetime. What matters is the bond you share, the oneness that you feel, the completeness in your soul that the other creates. What matters is how you feel and how you see yourself feeling in the future, and the desire in your heart to do whatever it takes to help that other person feel the same way. That is what love is all about.
The movie that I watched this time was Chasing Amy, a movie I’d seen many times before but for some reason had never gotten. Usually I view it as a story of what can happen when friends try to move beyond friendship into something more and also about the importance of truth in a relationship, but this time it dawned on me that that wasn’t it at all. It’s about more than that, something simpler than that. It’s about love. True love.
The whole story lends itself pretty easily to my original conclusion just in the way that Kevin Smith wrote in the entire plot of a lesbian and a guy becoming good friends only to have the guy announce his love to her and stuff happening as a result. The premise flows naturally into the issue of truth as the girl involved had had many experiences in life that she hadn’t shared and he, of course, eventually finds out about them and everything crumbles apart. I don’t know why I’ve always thought that that was all that drew me to it.
What I realized this time was that Kevin Smith was telling a story about how it doesn’t matter what happened in the past of the person you love. It doesn’t matter that two people don’t share the same experiences in the past. What matters are the present and the future. What matters are the experiences that two people in love share with each other. Everything else is null and void.
Maybe that’s the only aspect of life where that is the truly the case, but it is something that I think I’ve grasped in the last few years that I don’t think a lot of other people really have. And maybe it’s because I’ve grasped them that I never really saw that before…I don’t know. You see, I’m not very experienced in sex and love to tell you the truth and pretty much every girl that I come across in life is much more experienced that me – had more “adventures” if you will. That used to bother me…I used to look only for girls that had the same or less experience than me, never finding them, instead finding awesome girls that had had some, or much more than me. That bothered me.
I guess things started to change for me when I fell in love a few years back…with a girl that was an ex-cocaine addict and a more-or-less alcoholic that was not quite virginal. Somehow, none of that mattered to me even though I thought it should because, frankly, I was feeling quite inadequate and very naïve in the time that I was with her. Those were demons that I chased when she wasn’t around however, when I was with her they weren’t there at all.
Before then I was a twenty-year-old virgin who had never had more than a single drink and had never even thought of doing drugs (or, it might be the case, been around them). I believed most highly in never involving myself with a girl that wasn’t a virgin herself, a girl who drank, or a girl who did drugs. But somehow all of that subsided with her…as I did a little Amy-chasing myself.
And through the years that followed I learned the lesson over and over again as I kept finding girls that were interesting to me and yet were much more world-experienced than I was…each time figuring out that those experiences didn’t matter as much as I thought maybe they did. No, as time went on I realized that what did matter, the only thing that mattered was that I was interested in her and she in me…in the here and now…and that that interest was allowed to blossom itself into love. The past was irrelevant.
And now, today, as I write this, I can honestly say that I believe that. Not too long ago I had a conversation about sex and love and marriage and when the person I was talking to asked me if I could ever marry a girl with more experience than me I said “I don’t care”.
And it was, for some reason, bothering me today as I thought about that conversation (as something I saw on TV reminded me of another part of it). Did I believe that? Is it wrong for me to not care? Am I just leaving myself out in the wide open because I don’t want to exclude any chances? And the answers, in order are no, no, and no. I just honestly believe that if you love someone, what that person has done (and with who) is completely irrelevant (except, perhaps, in terms of STDs) to what you and that person are currently doing and what you will do in the time you have together – whether it’s a month, a year, or a lifetime. What matters is the bond you share, the oneness that you feel, the completeness in your soul that the other creates. What matters is how you feel and how you see yourself feeling in the future, and the desire in your heart to do whatever it takes to help that other person feel the same way. That is what love is all about.
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