Love Actually is....a Lovely Movie

Do you want to watch your movie tonight? My Father asks me as we are winding down on a Friday night this past week. He is referring to one of my favorite holidays movies, and if I’m being terribly honest - one of my favorite movies period, Love Actually. My Father and I have been watching that movie every year around Christmas for the past 8 or so years. Every year we find another line in it that we have never noticed or that we have forgotten over the year so the laughter we erupt in surprises us as though it was our first watch. We still both agree that the story line between Colin Firth’s character and the women he falls for both learning to speak one another’s language is the most endearing plot line, the Chav who comes to America in hopes of finding a “Hot American to worship him like a god,” is the funniest, and Emma Thompson will continue to shatter our hearts as she processes her husband’s affair in the mist of a Joni Mitchel song.

Yes, the movie has its problematic elements, but it never fails to bring warmth to my frostbitten heart. Especially as I mull over the year we have collectively endured. However, the scene replays through my mind intermittently through the year, is the opening monologue by none other than former dashing dunce, Hugh Grant. Over-voicing footage from the Arrival Gate at Hearthrow Airport, he discusses the hidden love that splatters itself throughout our lives. As Hugh narrates over scenes of friends, family, and loved ones greeting each other with warmth and affection, he proclaims that love often is undignified and small compared to the grandiose love affairs and theatrics of our favorite films and television shows.

The movie itself was made quickly in the aftermath of 9/11, as is mentioned in the voice over as Hugh discusses the phone calls made by the passengers aboard. While I am positive the capitalistic agenda of trying to re-warm the American public to trust flying and airports again was involved in the production funding of the film, it oddly doesn’t make me love it any less. Perhaps it was exactly what people needed in the aftermath of tradegy. No, I don’t mean Bill Knightly in tight leather pants discussing having sex with Britney Spears, but the reminder that even in the mixture of disappear, grief, loss, fury, disappoint, and the spicy cocktail of all the different emotions that comprise the human psyche - love, arguably the most powerful of human emotions, actually is still all around. While this holiday season will not contain long awaited hugs, sloppy kisses, reunions, gathering around a fire, and crowding too many people into one tiny kitchen, love, in its many disguises, blankets us like freshly fallen snow.

In the days passing this years rewatching of the film with my father, I gave extra care to observe the flicker of love that permeates through all other facets of our lives, and reflect on the often microscopic, un-extraordinary, unassuming, and nuanced ways that I see seen and felt love this year.

Here is what I came up with:

Every time someone orders someone else’s coffee with specificity and confidence because they know they like it with just enough cream to look like caramel and enough sugar to warrant getting your blood tested, they are showing their love. When I’m in the car with my father and he lets me control the radio, especially when I want to listen to Taylor Swift, he shows he loves me. When someone sends you a video, photo, poem, song, etc. and claims that they think you would like it, they are expressing their love. When Heather, my sweet coworker gifted me two books, both of the Romantic Comedy genre, I felt her love.

She was also right, it took me two evenings to finish one, and another inhale and I’ll have finished the second.

I see love when a child offers their parent a bite of their treat, without the parent asking. I see love and sacrifice when parents allow their children to splurge on expensive pastries and only allow themselves a small inexpensive treat of their own. I felt love every time my friend Nick would drive from Dayton to Columbus just for a game of socially distanced tennis and a round of trivia. It’s love every time that someone suggests that you go somewhere with them because they want to be with you when you experience it for the first time. I feel love every time my dear friend Caroline calls me when she is out for a walk because she wants to sneak in a few minutes of catchup, relationship and career advice, and laughing at each other’s misadventures through life. There is love in any silent human doing monotonous tasks such as emptying the dishwasher while allowing another human to rant and rave about their day, even after they say, “Okay, I’m done. And you know what else he had the nerv…” There is even love when my mother constantly asks to hold my belongings in her purse when we are together in public because she fears that despite many years without her, I will inevitably loose them. Which is equal parts infuriating, endearing, and understandable (I did once manage to lose my wallet and have it sent to a dairy farm in Wooster, OH).

There is love in glances exchanged that convey more than any language we can write, there is love in every handwritten letter or postcard, there is love in sharing, there is love in the laughter that is equal parts pain and pleasure, there is love between old friends, new friends, best friends, lovers, fast acquaintances, husbands, wives, partners, siblings. Hell, there is love between a barista and their favorite customer, who they quietly miss on their days off.

There is love written in this tedious and perhaps sappy blog post meant to provide even the slightest sliver of tender, sincere love to those who read it because they too love me, and show me by reading these verbose pieces. In an age where love can often feel so sparse or even lost, I have found that upon further inspection, it lives and breathes in us, around us, and between us. It exists in so many varied places and forms that we forget what it can look like, and in-turn become numb to what it can feel like.

Every year my father asks me if we want to watch “My movie,” knowing full well that I will say yes. He calls it my movie because he claims it’s a chick flick and he doesn’t really love it as much as I do. I know the tradition has formed because it is an act of love from my father to me, to watch a film I adore, even if he doesn’t really like it that much. However, it is also an act of love every time that I go along with the idea that he doesn’t love the film in equal measure as me, and allow him to preserve his masculinity while we both sip on our eggnog and quote all the best lines.

So next time you are feeling gloomy about the state of things, take some advice from our dear foreign friend, Hugh Grant, and look closely around you and you just might find that Love Actually is all around.