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Should We Seize Every Chance at Love?
Or is it appropriate to sometimes let it pass us by?
“If you love someone, you say it, you say it right then, out loud. Otherwise, the moment just…passes you by.”
Remember this line from My Best Friend’s Wedding? Michael and Julianne (played by Dermot Mulroney and Julia Roberts) are having an intense heart-to-heart about their friendship and how it is going to evolve once Michael is married, a conversation that hits the audience right in the heart, since we know something Michael doesn’t know: that Julianne is in love with him.
Michael is clearly trying to convey his feelings of affection to Julianne (which we find out later do not include romantic love), and he quotes his fiancée, Kimmy, who believes that love demands that we seize the moment, share our feelings, and leap at whatever opportunity Cupid brings our way.
For a moment, we as the audience, along with Julianne, are tantalized by the thought that maybe Michael does have feelings for Julianne. Maybe this is his surreptitious way of telling her, not wanting to reveal all his cards until he knows she feels the same about him.
Kimmy’s advice about love is the foundation upon which the romcom was built. And in many ways, even the real world of dating.
Love is wonderful. Love is rare. Love (and sex and having children) is the only useful thing a woman can do with her life. If it comes your way…take it! Grab it! Run toward it screaming yes lest it pass you by.
In a world invested in the concept of carpe diem, this sounds like really good advice — especially considering how much our culture fetishizes romantic relationships. Of course we should grab at any opportunity to pair up!
But I’m not so sure it holds up under closer inspection…
I often marveled at the amount of times the people around me were having affairs. Over the years, I came to understand that infidelity was not as simple a moral concept as I originally thought, but still…given all the layered complexities and the guarantee of collateral damage, it seemed strange to me that it was such a frequent occurrence.
