“Aww, what a beautiful movie, huh?
Watch, he’ll come running right on cue.
Just as she boards the plane he catches her
and tells her that his love is forever true.

He’ll say: ‘I’ll follow you anywhere.
I see the future with us two.’
And then: THE KISS…
I want a happy ending like that too.”

Love scrapes together the last bit of popcorn
and tips the bowl upside down over her mouth.
“Mmm… mmm… happily ever after.
For these two, that’s heading south.”

I jab my elbow into her ribs,
quick and short.
She doubles over, caught off guard.
I hear her laugh and snort.

“What? You know I’m right.
His looks are not the reason she finds him appealing.
She’s drawn to him because he touches old wounds,
from a past she’s still concealing.

In three years she’ll be crying,
sitting in some therapist’s chair.
Feeling small and subordinate to her husband,
her life filled with sadness and despair.

He’ll dig up her old pain,
stir what’s already sore.
Why do you think he waits for the last minute,
until she’s almost out the door?

Why this moment to tell her he wants her,
when she was already torn?
That’s not passion, but avoidance.
A man who’s still emotionally unborn.

In his childhood, feelings were never addressed.
He learned, instead, to withdraw.
‘Don’t whine, just carry on’
That was the family’s unwritten law.

Of course he lands a partner who feels everything.
She mirrors the closeness he’s never known.
The tragic part is he can’t hold her emotions,
because he never learned to carry his own.

He’ll rationalize her hurt away,
brush off what she expresses.
Because that is what love looks like in his book.
Love is distant, love suppresses.

They will both feel misunderstood, unseen
if they are still together in ten years’ time.
Their wounded inner child will write the script.
So immature, unbalanced, so out of rhyme.

They will probably have children
and pass the pattern, unaware.
Never with bad intentions, of course,
but they repeat what they don’t repair.”

I stare at the screen where credits are rolling,
feel-good music trying to hold the mood in place.
“I thought Love had some sense of romance,
some softness, some grace.”

“Romance is beautiful,” she says.
“But don’t get it confused, my friend.
Sometimes it’s not romance you’re watching,
but wounded hearts that long to mend.”

I look at her, half teasing, half sincere.
“So is there hope for love in mankind?”
She smiles. “Of course there is.
If they are willing to stop being blind.

If they can recognize old pain, dressed up as desire.
Awareness is the first real shift.
The ones that do the work and dare to look inside,
they are the ones that get the gift.”

-Sigrid Sneijders-