Love Is Enough

does love mean never having to say you're sorry?

The infamous line from Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal in the 1970 weepy, Love Story, states -- "Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Once again we have sweeping advice about love and romance from Hollywood...advice that is just really terrible and only sustainable if your ill-fated "love story" ends before it really begins. Ali MacGraw's Jenny is dead at 25! Ryan's Oliver grieves for about twenty minutes or until Candice Bergen appears during Oliver's Story.

John Lennon, on the other hand, is quoted as saying, "Love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes."

I happen to agree with John on this one, but it's taken me a very long time to get here. 

love and romance...hollywood style

Recently, I was driving in my car and a local radio station announced that it had been polling the audience all day asking them to vote for the #1 Romantic Movie of All Time. And then it proudly announced that the inner of the poll was none other then....drumroll please....GHOST.

At first, I thought, that was a pretty cool choice. After all, I agree that Ghost is funny, thrilling, original, scary (anything with Whoopi Goldberg usually is), and sexy (yes it's hard to forget Demi and Patrick in Pottery 101). But as I was driving along listening to the disc jockeys rattle off their own personal favorite romantic movies (Titanic, Casablanca, The English Patient, Gone With The Wind, The Way We Were, and others) I was immediately struck by one common theme in their choices.

Is it possible that in movies, the most romantic scenarios aren't those in which lovers are united for life -- but those in which lovers are kept apart for eternity or DIE young?

** Note: This is a repost from The Philosophical Mother, 2003