Today I’m celebrating Orthodox Easter, and my post is about love as if it’s Valentine’s Day. That’s how I seem to be wired. Out of sync with time.
Blame it on Loving Adults, a Danish movie I stumbled on this past week at the end of a long day, trying to escape and numb myself from my own thoughts.
The movie starts with a retired detective telling his daughter, a bride-to-be, as if trying to warn her before it’s too late, that love is actually the biggest threat in life.
One hour and forty-four minutes of twisted, mind-blowing action in the name of love. I won’t spoil it in case you want to watch it. By the end, I felt so sick to my stomach that instead of going to sleep, I searched Netflix under the comedy genre and picked another movie.
Mango, another Danish movie with the same male lead actor, didn’t feel like a comedy to me but it sure felt like the opposite of Loving Adults. Like stepping out of darkness into light. Or so I thought.
Until I noticed the common thread running through both of them. Two love stories carrying the charge of old wounds. One kills and the other heals. One shuts the door on love and the other becomes a way back to it.
Maybe that’s why love is never just love. We make it sound pure, simple, worth wanting at any cost. But love can come mixed with fear and old pain, and turn into darkness.
That’s where the two love stories split. One wraps itself around the wound and feeds on it. The other softens the wound, opens a tightly closed door, and brings a person back to life.
We want love to heal us, to wake us up, to make life feel less empty. But we also know, whether we admit it or not, that love can make us shrink, control, or even destroy us.
The question becomes not whether love finds us, but what love touches in us when it does. Because sometimes it brings us back to life. And other times it takes us further away from ourselves.
A little dark for Easter, maybe. Then again, maybe not. Resurrection, after all, is also about what gets brought back to life.