Romantic Beauty is found in the knowing

​Yesterday, I went to see the movie It Ends With Us. I don't know if I need to offer a spoiler alert, because I'm not sure how the words will come out as I process what I experienced in that movie, but I'm not big on editing, so as a precaution, I offer you a spoiler alert.

The movie is billed as a romance. I suppose it is. But romance is often thought of as a beautiful feeling of sorts, when this movie, if you pay close attention, dives much deeper than feelings. It dives to a place where sometimes romance isn't anything beautiful at all.

It dives into the generational makeup of our feelings, our inheritance of sorts, and how we so often struggle to navigate the emotional inheritance of our past inside the emotional existence of our present.

Inside our romances.

It dives into the stories we bring to our romances, often stories untold and stories buried, with some hopes that romance itself will purify all of them, if not make them totally disappear. With hopes romance will somehow make a beautiful plot of them; a romantic savior coming to turn lifelong nightmares to rooftop stargazing and kissing.

But often, these stories we bring, they are immune to rooftops. They don't believe in saviors. They love the distraction of the rooftop, for sure, but all the while long to return to the dungeon, the only place these stories have ever felt safe.

Unexposed.

But eventually, romance is intolerant of dungeons. An intolerance that comes to look a lot like hiding or exploding or a mix of both.

Romance, then, is faced with a choice. Only for those inside the romance who have never seen anything different, or felt it, they don't recognize a choice at all. And so settle into a pattern dictated by the dungeon and not inspired by the rooftop.

A pattern that will become someone's emotional inheritance one day.

There are some, though, who somewhat miraculously come to recognize this pattern within themselves. And they become inspired by bravery more than rooftops. Because the reality is, escaping patterns can feel a lot more like hell than romance. But the rooftop has left them just curious enough about what might be on the other side of hell to try to bravely go there.

And maybe they are fueled in ways by a longing for those who are theirs to experience rooftops that aren't escape routes from hell. 
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Because, as the movie shows us, it is possible.

Romance, in all of its beauty, is possible on the other side of hell. But it turns out romance doesn't look like a connection free of dungeons, it looks like two people who not only know each other's dungeons, but aren't afraid of going there.

Together.

Surely they will always prefer the rooftops, but dungeons no longer scare them or serve as a subconscious threat to them.

Many of us bring unknown stories with us to romance. As it turns out in the movie, and I suppose in real life romances, it is the unknown stories, unknown to ourselves and to one another, that will devour any of the beautiful feelings of romance.

Romantic beauty and life, it turns out, is found in the knowing.

And maybe in the end it is found on the rooftop, where you can fully see the stars and the world for miles and miles, but much more importantly, possibly, where you can fully see one another without any distance at all.