Here comes an embarrassing confession. I love Hallmark movies.
I love their unpredictability. Storylines vary so much from one movie to another. You never see the surprise ending that is coming.
You’re probably saying something like ‘what?’ right now. If you’ve watched any more than one, you know they’re all the same. They start with two people who rub each other the wrong way, they slowly start coming together, the lady accidentally falls and the guy catches her and then the two of them have that minute-long gaze into each other’s eyes.
Then comes that first kiss and just before the lips meet, an interruption comes along and the kiss doesn’t happen. Oh, did I mention that somewhere in all of this – usually just after that fall and the prolonged gaze – the woman says something like, “I should really be going.” Then, just as it looks like love will win the day, up pops a snag and one (or both) of the full-grown adults acts like an inexperienced teenager and has to take advice from mom or dad or a sibling or best friend or, worst of all, from one of their young kids who shouldn’t know anything about love at all.
Then, surprise, the advice is followed, the man or woman goes chasing after the one they had fallen for, only to discover that the other person is doing the same thing. They have a long, long kiss and everybody lives happily ever after.
As I said…they’re all the same. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen all 1,200 of them!
Yet, I still love them. It’s the romance and happy endings that does it. They’re feel-good movies. As if my first confession wasn’t embarrassing enough, here’s another – a few times I’ve felt tears welling up in my eyes.
Yikes! What’s become of me?
Valentine’s Day has just passed – the day of love. Do those Hallmark movies show realistic love? Is love simply a romantic, feel-good, fluffy type of thing? Should that be what Valentine’s Day is all about?
What about this kind of love?
I once knew an elderly man whose wife developed dementia. Every day, sometimes twice a day, he’d visit her in the personal care home. He’d climb into her bed, lay beside her and hug her. The day came when she no longer knew who he was. She became disturbed that this ‘stranger’ was lying in her bed. It broke his heart to know that she no longer knew him and he could no longer embrace her. But he still visited her daily, sitting in her room, watching the woman that he loved, knowing that nothing was coming back to him in return.
Is there room on Valentine’s Day to celebrate that type of ‘non-fluffy’ love? That hard love?
I know another man whose wife had dementia. She was hospitalized an hour away. Several times a week, he’d hop into his car, drive the hour there and the hour back, and sit with her for a few hours in between. She was finally able to move to his hometown, but by then, he was pretty much beyond her recognition.
Still, he’d visit her several times a week. The last year of her life, he visited her at meal times to feed her. His heart ached because the love of his life no longer knew him and was no longer even able to feed herself. Feeding someone in that condition can be very messy, yet there he was every day to help her eat, sadly watching his wife deteriorate to death. His love flowing down a one-way street.
We don’t hear much of that type of love on Valentine’s Day.
I love romance, the love that is easy, light and fluffy – that Hallmark kind of love. But true love is usually much harder than what we celebrate on Valentine’s Day or see in those edge-of-the-seat Hallmark movies.
