Two-Hour Romance

This is a ponderation several weeks in the making. I think the primary catalyst was my introduction to “While You Were Sleeping.” It’s a very cute movie, and for some reason I’d missed it until now. Everyone just assumed I had seen it, and perhaps rightfully so. According to close friends and even casual readers of this blog, my entire persona apparently screams, “Hi, I’ve seen every romantic comedy in the world and except my life to follow those exact parameters!” Au contraire. But I digress too soon.
The second reason I was thinking about this was because of a situation between two friends of mine. They have both suffered, and continue to suffer, a great deal for one another. Why? Because they love each other. Because they are each other’s match, soul mate, kindred spirit, however you want to put it. But they have chosen to love each other, and as decent human beings, they have fought for each other when the necessity arose. Oh, it’s not been a fairy tale romance, by the world’s standards – and even if it was, they’ve not reached “ever after” yet – yet I respect their love more than any other I have seen among my peers.
As an aside, why do we use that phrase “fairy tale romance” anyway? Maybe I read folks wrong, but when people use that phrase, they seem to mean that everything was perfect for the couple prancing down the primrose path of love, straight to the altar, the white picket fence, and the 2.5 kids. When did we forget that in fairy tales, there are dragons and dangers? That rescues needed to be undertaken and executed? That there were good guys and bad guys, and all of that is what made the story in the first place?
So it is in that sense that they have had a fairy tale romance, to the degree that it made me think, “Wow. I’ll have to write their story some day.” What better tribute, I thought, to lives well-lived than a story that reflected their hardships and victories? Even better, a screenplay – a movie, to share it with the world.
But then I stopped myself. Not because of privacy concerns, or because I thought they’d be embarrassed. Instead, I realized that condensing their story into a two-hour time slot was impossible. I would defy any writer of any ability to do an adequate, much less outstanding, job of capturing this romance for public consumption. They don’t fit into the romantic comedy mold. There have been times of silence and action in turn, punctuated by moments of utter joy and deepest sorrow. But when you condense those years into two hours, you lose some of the meaning and richness and texture of it. You’d lose a lot, actually.
And that is the reason why romantic movies are unrealistic. It’s not unrealistic because someone gets swept off their feet or their dreams come true or someone realizes what is most important in life. I would venture to say that the above happens every day… but it is after a long process of working up to that point. It almost never happens spontaneously or without cause. There was a circumstance, a decision, something that drove them to that realization. The background of that could have taken weeks. Months. Years.
Case and point: “While You Were Sleeping.” If you’ve seen it, you will hopefully understand what I’m talking about here. At the beginning, when Lucy is observing the daily heart throb, it makes you wonder how long she watched him before the day of their fateful meeting (if you could call it that). How many days or months did she live in her dream world? How many times did she talk herself out of this adolescent crush… and then succumb to it again? How many times had she convinced herself that, no, really, today was the day she would talk to him? We don’t know; we’re never told, and it passes in an instant before everything changes.
Conversely, at the end of the movie, we see Lucy again in her booth, after the wedding fiasco and walking away from the trail of well-meaning deception she left behind. We see no evidence that she has had any hope that Jack with come after her. All we know is that they knew each other for two weeks, and bam, she’s back and life is normal and boring again. She’s just going through her routine, and marinating about how close she was to having everything she wanted.
We have no clue how long it took Jack to get his act together. Yeah, it could’ve been the next day. But it probably wasn’t. Was it the next week, the next month? A half-year later?
The point is, real life is what happens between the cuts of a movie. In reality, we can’t gloss over the miserable and lonely times with a montage of him looking lonely and her looking lonely as sappy music swells in the background. My friends can’t fast forward to the part where everything does turn out alright. No one can. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen; it means it’s not here yet. In our instant-gratification culture, we surround ourselves with notions that something’s wrong if everything doesn’t work out at this instant or that it still hasn’t worked out after all this time. It is not so. The times “off-camera” are when we are called to work out our salvation by trusting God when nothing is certain. We are naturally inclined to cry out to God in distress, and when we are close enough to God, I believe we are equally liable to recognize His goodness in times of joy or success. It’s the indefinite, lackluster, in-between times that seem darkest because we don’t see God as having anything to do with it. But he does. Not just with love stories, but with life stories. That’s why we’re not just raptured up to Heaven when we believe. God has things to work out yet, in and through us.
And this is the fun part: God is a better storyteller than any human writer. Unlike Hollywood producers, He does care about the in-between times when no one else is watching. He is concerned not just with the end, but the means. And He’ll do whatever it takes, no matter how long it takes, to get His kids where they need to be.
I’m preaching to myself as much as anyone else, but to those who are in those less-than-glamorous part of your story, there is reason and purpose to this. The months will end, the years will pass, and someday you will look back and wonder at what was accomplished in your own heart and life in this time when you thought nothing important was going on.
After all… would you really want to settle for a pre-packaged, predictable, television-rerun, two-hour romance?