Serendipity

Just watched the movie Serendipity (2001, with John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale) for the first time. As far as romantic comedies go I'd give it 3 stars as it has (almost) all you'd want in this genre, except of course a satisfying ending. Spoiler alert: Don't keep reading if you haven't seen the movie and want to. Don't know why I even bothered to write that since it has the mother of all predictable endings. You guessed it, they live happily ever after. So the whole premise of the story is that these two people meet, spend a magical evening together, go their separate ways and leave it for fate to decide whether they will ever meet up again.

You see, I think my problem is that on the one hand I really, really want to believe that the events of our lives are meant to be, that fate has a hand in all we do and steers us in the right direction when we begin to stray away. On the other hand, my actual faith in fate does not seem to exist. I've said things like, "it was meant to happen," often enough, but do I really believe it? The truth is that I didn't want Jonathan and Sarah to end up together in the end because it doesn't fit into my reality, into my explanation of how things work in this life. That crap just doesn't happen in real life.

Love doesn't work like that. So how does it work? You ask. Maybe when Jonathan and Sarah met, they really did fall in love, (please refer to the posting "Love at First Sight" for further opinions on this matter) but why oh why does that mean they are "meant" to be together forever? You can love someone a whole whole lot, but that doesn't mean that guy is good for you to be with.

Try and stay with me here. If fate, particularly as it pertains to love, were real than what exactly would be the point of living? If everything was mapped out ahead of time, if that was possible to do, than why do it?

Now to contradict. It is also just as impossible to believe that the events of our lives happen randomly. Could it really be by chance that ____(insert event of your life) happened? What about all those times when you KNOW you got a sign from someone, somewhere, well maybe from Fate herself.

All I've been able to establish thus far is that love does not happen by chance and also that we are not destined to love either. All I can come up with is that love must be something we can't quite understand, like God, or the afterlife, or death. So maybe love is God. Maybe love IS the unexplainable. Dare I continue in this quest to define it?

Love is: infinite, unexplainable