Writing
Theory of Love: From a Movie to Real Life
There is a film called Stuck in Love that stayed with me long after I watched it. What interested me was the way three people in the same family approached love from entirely different places.
Rusty is encountering it with the openness of someone discovering a new world. His sister, Samantha, has seen enough hurt to distrust it. Their father, Bill, remains attached to a relationship that has ended.
Watching them, I kept returning to a question: how can something so familiar remain so difficult to understand?
We recognise love in a face lighting up, in the ache of missing someone, or in a silence that feels comfortable. Yet ask us what love actually is, and the certainty begins to disappear.
I wanted to explore that gap. I do not have a scientific theory of love, despite the title. What follows is a personal inquiry into what loving someone asks of us, and why understanding another person seems so closely connected to understanding ourselves.
Three ways of meeting love
Rusty's story carries the vulnerability of first love. He writes a poem about a girl he likes, and she notices him. There is something moving about that simple wish to express what we feel and be understood.
His ambition to become a writer also made me think about experience. We can read about grief, desire, and disappointment. We can develop a vocabulary for them. But living through them changes our relationship with the words.
A book can help us understand an experience. It cannot have the experience for us.
Samantha approaches love from the other direction. Having witnessed the damage in her parents' relationship, she has learned to protect herself. Her scepticism makes sense within the life she has known.
Then she meets someone who unsettles that certainty. To me, the interesting part is the possibility that her conclusion about love might be incomplete. Allowing that possibility means risking hurt again. It also means discovering something her existing view of the world cannot accommodate.
I think many of us recognise that conflict. An experience hurts us, and we turn it into a rule. Eventually, we forget that the rule was formed in response to one part of life.
Bill's story reveals another difficulty. Experience has not freed him from attachment. His longing exists alongside jealousy and an inability to let go. I would hesitate to call that peaceful or mature love. What it shows me is how easily love becomes entangled with the desire to recover what we have lost.
These characters brought me to three questions. Can I let myself feel? Can I question what hurt has taught me? Can I care for someone without insisting that the relationship take the form I want?
The movie gave those questions a setting. Real life made them harder to leave alone.
Where do we experience love?
When we say two people are in love, we speak as though love were a single thing held between them. But each person experiences it from within a life the other can never fully inhabit.
The feeling I have is mine. Yours is yours. We may influence each other deeply, but we cannot assume that our experiences are identical.
That distinction matters to me. Another person can awaken something powerful in us, yet they do not become the owner of everything we feel. My love does not establish what you feel in return, or what you owe me.
Recognising this can be uncomfortable. It can also loosen the need to control the person we love. We begin to take responsibility for our own experience while paying closer attention to theirs.
There are small moments when that experience becomes impossible to ignore. Our face changes when someone enters the room. We cry alone in a bathroom, then wash our face and return to the day. For a moment, the ambitions and plans through which we usually describe ourselves recede. Something more immediate asks for our attention.
I used to think acceptance might end the struggle. Now I see it more as a beginning. Admitting that I am sad does not remove the sadness. It allows me to stop spending all my energy pretending otherwise.
What we call our nature
We often describe ourselves in shorthand: I am sensitive. He gets angry easily. She finds it difficult to trust.
Those descriptions may capture a pattern, but they do not explain it. What happens just before the anger? What does a moment of silence seem to mean? Why does one kind of rejection disturb us more than another?
I have often imagined these reactions as programs. Something happens, a familiar interpretation begins, and a familiar response follows. The metaphor helps me notice repetition, although a person is far more complicated than a piece of code.
Understanding the pattern does not make it disappear immediately. It gives us something to examine. Perhaps the anger is protecting an image of ourselves. Perhaps the demand for reassurance comes from a fear we have never named. We cannot know simply by attaching a label; we have to look.
This is where love and self-inquiry begin to meet for me. A close relationship brings parts of us into view that may remain hidden when we are alone. We discover how we respond to another person's independence, disappointment, attention, or refusal.
The discovery is not always flattering. It is useful precisely because it challenges the version of ourselves we prefer to believe.
Attraction and the image of ourselves
I once loved a girl who was the talk of the town. Looking back, I can admit that being associated with her also pleased my ego.
That admission does not explain everything I felt. It makes the inquiry more honest. Was I interested in her as a person, or partly in what being with her seemed to say about me? At different moments, perhaps both were true.
We bring expectations into relationships: beauty, success, status, the kind of life we imagine having together. Some preferences reflect practical needs and genuine compatibility. Others help us maintain an image of ourselves.
The difficulty is telling them apart.
Getting to know someone gradually exposes the distance between the person and the image. They have fears we did not anticipate, desires we do not share, and ways of seeing the world that resist our explanations.
Can our curiosity survive that discovery? Can we revise the image when the person no longer fits it?
Understanding someone without losing ourselves
Trying to understand another person can lead us back into ourselves. Recognising our own jealousy may make someone else's jealousy less mysterious. Facing our fear of rejection may help us hear the fear beneath a difficult conversation.
That is one way I understand compassion. It becomes harder to reduce someone to a single reaction when we have seen how much can sit behind our own.
But understanding has limits. Knowing why someone is angry does not make their cruelty acceptable. Recognising their pain does not require us to remain available to be hurt.
Enduring abuse is not evidence of deeper love or understanding. Compassion does not create an obligation to tolerate harm. We cannot infer love from violence, or claim to know why someone stays or leaves.
Understanding another person should make it possible to respond more clearly. Sometimes that response is patience. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes it is leaving.
A relationship also requires willingness from both people. One person's effort to understand cannot substitute indefinitely for the other's responsibility to examine their behaviour.
Can we stay in love?
The possibility that interested me most was whether continued self-discovery could help love remain alive.
If I believe I know everything about myself, I have little reason to question my reactions. If I believe I know everything about you, I may stop listening. Our conversations become rehearsals of conclusions we have already reached.
People change, sometimes in ways that are difficult to notice from nearby. What once reassured us may begin to feel restrictive. An ambition may lose its importance. A fear may soften. Paying attention means allowing our understanding to change too.
I cannot promise that this keeps anyone in love forever. Two people can act honestly and still find that their lives no longer fit together. But curiosity seems to give love more room than certainty does. It leaves space for the person who is here now, rather than only the person we remember.
This is also why I connect love with spirituality. By spirituality, I mean an inquiry into how we live, what we identify with, and what prevents us from seeing clearly. Loving someone can bring those questions into ordinary life with uncomfortable force.
Why did that comment wound me? Why do I need to be right? Am I listening to what you are saying, or preparing a defence?
There is nothing abstract about those questions when someone we care about is sitting across from us.
I began with a movie and the hope of understanding love. I still cannot give it a definition that contains everything we mean by the word. What I can see more clearly is the work involved in loving: the willingness to look at ourselves, to let another person remain distinct from our idea of them, and to keep learning when certainty would be easier.
Perhaps that is why love feels so simple in some moments and so difficult across a lifetime. Feeling it can happen before we understand much at all. Living with it asks us to keep looking.
Adapted from “Theory of Love Part 1: The Movie” (29 January 2023) and “Theory of Love Part 2: Real Life” (3 February 2023).
Film details checked against the Becker Film Group synopsis of Stuck in Love. The readings of its characters are the author's interpretations.