An Affair to Remember: A Counter Tragedy

About four o'clock this morning, I finally realized why the plot of Casanova seemed hauntingly familiar. It's because I've seen that story before--two people making their livings off of the misplaced affections of others fall hopelessly, and impractically, in love. That's the basic plot of one of my very favorite films, An Affair to Remember. But where in Casanova the characters' unwillingness to live a life of hardship and sacrifice makes the tale a tragedy, the choices of the characters in An Affair to Remember make it an uplifting story of the redemption of selfless love.

In An Affair to Remember, two people meet aboard a trans-Atlantic cruise. One is an artist-turned-playboy, now engaged to an heiress. The other is a lounge singer and live-in girlfriend of a wealthy businessman. The man takes the woman to meet his grandmother on an Italian island, one of the ship's ports-of-call. While there, they both stop and pray in the family chapel. That moment they drop their guards, see each other as they really are, and begin to fall in love. When the cruise ends, they decide to meet in sixth months. If they've successfully turned their lives around, they will marry. Instead of running back to safety and security, as Casanova and Henriette would have done, these two leave their lovers and set off to become independent, to redeem their past lives of indolence and questionable morals, and to make themselves worthy of the love they share.

That's what love is. They never pine or mourn or even complain about the situation. They give in to the transformative power of love. They take great pride and pleasure in their growing abilities to take care of themselves and to make moral choices. Love makes them want to be better than they were before. And the process is cyclic. The better they become, the more they love; the more they love, the better they become.

That process, of love refining my personality and inter-personal interactions, is what I enjoy most in my relationship with Adam. Over all our time apart, I've gradually noticed how much more difficult it is to be nice to people and to use my time in efficient ways. It's part of why I feel so comfortable in my vocation to marry him: being with him makes me better. Not being with him makes it more difficult to be good.

As much as I empathize with Casanova and Henriette, it's an empathy born of the knowledge that they've made a tragically wrong choice. They've chosen to remain static, unchanged by the powerful impulse of love which leaves people with little choice but to grow better. That's what I have with Adam and what I hope we'll never lose.