Our Love Story Was Like Our Favourite Movies
It’s Not Always Happily Ever After
When I was thinking about what someone’s favourite movies and shows reveal, I started thinking about one ex, I’ll call him Dennis* (*not his real name.) We had very different taste in movies. We enjoyed some movies together, and even shared one favourite, but our favourites revealed some major differences in our definitions of love.
Spoiler Alerts: Veer-Zaara (2004), Fanaa (2006), Devdas (2002), Anwar (2007)
Dennis and I both enjoyed Veer-Zaara (2004) “a saga of love, separation, courage, and sacrifice.” A Pakistani and an Indian fall in love, knowing that they can’t be together. They try to run away together, without success. He’s taken away. She thinks he’s died in a bus crash, but her family had had him arrested and hidden in prison, to keep them apart. Neither knew what happened to the other. She went on to live her life in his village, happy in her own life, and living in the memory of the love they’d shared. He’d been thinking of her while he was in isolation. They get reunited over 20 years later and live happily ever after.
From there, our favourite movies differed. I liked Fanaa (2006) a bittersweet love story about a blind woman who falls in love with a man. She gets surgery to restore her sight around the same time he disappears. She believes he was killed in a terrorist attack. She moves on, and becomes happy in her life. She later meets and falls in love with someone who turns out to be the same man. He hadn’t died in the terrorist attack; he was the terrorist who’d set off the attack. When she finds out, she has to choose between her love for the man, and her moral conviction and country. She chooses her country.
Dennis’ favourite movie, and one that he often compared to our relationship, was Devdas (2002) about a man who can’t marry the woman he loves. He becomes an alcoholic and lets his life spiral out of control. They both live unhappily, until he intentionally drinks himself to death, dying on her doorstep.
Another of his favourites was Anwar (2007) about a man who can’t be with the woman he loves. He sabotages her plans to be with someone else — with tragic consequences. Then, guilt-ridden, he locks himself in a temple and contemplates suicide and life.
Our love story mirrored the movies.
Like Veer-Zaara, Dennis and I came from different cultures. Circumstances meant that we were ill-fated to be together. He feared that his family wouldn’t accept me, just like Zaara’s family hadn’t accepted Veer. I’d been learning about his culture, language, religion, and more, but…I’m white — a fact that he’d remind me of when I didn’t immediately do what he wanted me to.
We both loved each other, but it was an unhealthy, codependent love (like in many movies.) We both struggled with our differences, which were less about overt culture and more about incompatible values, and conflicting definitions and expectations of “love.”
He took up drinking.
When we’d first met, he’d only drink half a drink in an evening. He started getting hammered (drunk) on a regular basis. He told me he drank because of our love, and often referenced Devdas. He said that his drinking signified how much he wanted to be with me, knowing that we had other differences preventing us from being together.
He used his drinking to an advantage, along with my unhealthy boundaries and caretaking. He believed that me doing what he wanted, when he wanted, at the sacrifice of what was important to me, was a way for me to “prove” my love, and he needed regular reassurance in this way.
His drinking became a way to manipulate me, and I went along with it (staying with him) for years.
He knew that I’m sensitive about drunk driving. When I had a preplanned event with my friends or family (that he knew about,) he would go out and get drunk, then threaten to drive himself home. In the rare events that I didn’t pick him up, he would drive himself home drunk.
He would routinely put himself in danger (with the threats of drunk driving) and I would abandon my plans to go rescue him and drive him home safely.
When I tried to set boundaries, or even ask him to plan his drinking or take a cab, Dennis would either break up with me, or threaten self harm or suicide.
He told me that if I didn’t immediately abandon myself to do what he wanted, then I didn’t love him.
He said if I didn’t love him (or we couldn’t be together,) he had no reason to live.
He broke up with me countless times. Then he’d miss me and I’d miss him, and we’d get back together.
We both made sacrifices for each other, but they were neither healthy, nor aligned with the other’s desires. We weren’t compatible. We held the ideal that love could fix (at least some of) our differences. We were wrong.
Dennis thought that love should be self-sacrificing to the point that I would be willing to quit my job, leave my family and friends, and run away with him. It was in many movies where the woman left everything for her love. (I wasn’t willing to do all of that.)
I was trying to live my life (including him in it) and also be independent and respect what I wanted in my life. He needed more from me than what I was willing to give.
Our love story paralleled some of our favourite movies because when our love wasn’t what he wanted it to be, (and later, after we broke up,) he drank himself into an unhealthy lifestyle — in the name of unfulfilled love, like Devdas. When things got difficult or we might not be together, he contemplated suicide, like Anwar.
I kept trying to live my life, like Fanaa, and ultimately chose myself over him. I’ve moved forward in my life.
We tried to be friends after we broke up, but the theme of Veer-Zaara kept coming up: he believed that we would one day be together and live happily ever after — even if it was decades later. I don’t want that. I don’t see us being together again.
I’d told him that it was over and we would only ever be friends. When he was sober, he’d say he was okay with that, but when he was drunk he’d admit that he was waiting for me and would wait endless lifetimes because he knew we would be together one day.
I told him a few years ago that I would no longer be in contact with him. Our behaviour was unhealthy together, and I was moving forward in my life. What we had was special, and it was over.
He still messages me occasionally, to let me know that he’s not over me and he hopes to one day be together. I haven’t responded in years.
For me to say “it’s over” is still a response, and a continuation of our contact. In the first few years, it only fuelled his belief that we’d one day be together… He was willing to wait for me, until I finally believed in our love again.
I can’t control what he thinks or believes, but I can control my responses.
He said I was mean of me to not respond after I’d said my final goodbye.
Sometimes it’s more kind to be mean (in not responding.)
Sometimes it’s more cruel to be nice (in responding.) Because his hopes had been further fed.
I needed to learn more strength in my boundaries: to be more firm in the finality of something I saw wouldn’t be healthy for either of us. I had to learn to look after myself, including leaving him and excluding him from my life in any sense.
I’ve moved on to new ideals, new movies.
Like Fanaa, I’m living my life, even without him.
I’m choosing me.
