Can love only bloom at a distance?
I’m rewatching 500 days of summer, spurred on by a sudden wave of post holiday nostalgia. I don’t know if it’s the post holiday binge eating induced stupor or just the fact that I’ve aged more than a decade since the first time I’ve watched this film, but it’s hitting different this time.
The first time I watched it, I must have been around fifteen. My more artistically inclined, cinephile friends immediately declared it a masterpiece. As we exited the theater, I remember fervent teenage chatter about how perfectly Zooey Deschanel embodied the manic pixie dream girl trope, and how attractive Joseph Gordon-Levitt was.
I don’t remember thinking much of it myself. It was entertaining, sure, and New York City looked like a fun place to be twenty-something.
In my 30s now, having lived out much of my twenties in New York, every subtlety of that film is landing hard.
Maybe it’s the thousands of ways I see myself in Tom. I once wrote a college essay about The Architecture of Happiness – an essay that landed me in a humanities scholars program. I forgot how prominently the book featured in the movie.
Or maybe it’s the fact that I once wanted to major in green architecture as well. Or the way my younger Gen Z brother is SO MUCH COOLER and wiser than me, just like how Chloe Grace Moretz’ little sister character is cooler than Tom.
Or maybe it’s the way Tom projects a thousand fantasies onto his partner (oops, been there). Or the way he tries to build his entire sense of self on the unstable, ever-shifting foundation of another person.
I can now viscerally relate to how the relentless gears of time grind out the hopeful romantic possibility of youth. Infinite possibilities collapsed into one irreversible past. How adulthood forces you to compromise on your ideals – whether it’s out of pragmatism, laziness, insecurity or whatever else.
More than anything, the film made me think about the way love might need distance to survive, and flourish.
I sometimes wonder if love can only be fully felt in the abstract, or at least at arm’s length. In the curvature of a Zaha Hadid building. In the luminous intensity of a Jade Fadojutimi painting. Or in a Covid era hinge fling that was intense but brief and unresolved – forever frozen as a question mark instead of a period. You can’t fall out of love with someone you never really knew. Not up close anyway.
Tom loved Summer most when she left enough negative space for him to fill in the blanks. When she was more canvas than person.
The most profound loves might be the ones that almost happen, but not quite. In the more recent romantic comedy Eternity, the protagonist played by Elizabeth Olsen was happiest with her first husband, someone she barely knew compared to her second husband of several decades.
Things up close – hyper real – are messy, vulgar almost. Full of inadequacies, and a thousand tiny disappointments. You cannot romanticize the things that insist on being so clear and literal they leave no room for interpretation.
Like the way they don’t clean up the dishes or put the toilet lid back down. Or the way they don’t keep the promises they make to themselves, or to you.
TikTok insists that a crush is just a lack of information. But maybe that’s the only way love can sustain itself. With the edges a little fuzzy, the blemishes a little blurred.
I have a lot of experience with loving at a distance. Sometimes I think it’s the only way I know how to love – a city, a concept, a person frozen safely in time. Unreachable, immaculate. So much room for projection.
Or maybe that’s just limerance?
I’m currently in the Toronto airport lounge, en route to New York City again, the city that I tell everyone I want to die in. Not anytime soon, God willing, but the city that I hope I can find my way back to somehow and spend the rest of my decades in.
It’s perhaps the only thing in life I’ve learned to love in both the abstract and the concrete. The messy, disgusting, smelly, rat-infested concrete.
I sometimes think that this city will be the only real love I’ll ever have in life. And even if that were the case, I would still count myself lucky.
Or maybe, it’s just a skill issue. And I will feel entirely differently at 60 – having learned how to love a real human being up close, without the buffer of distance. In that case, I’ll be sure to update you all in 30 years.
If you’ve read this far, I’d love to know – have you ever been in love? Up close, or only in the abstract?
