Confessions & Consequences

Movie Inspiration: Love Actually

It’s my favourite movie of all time, my favourite Christmas movie in particular. It combines a lot of my interests, actually - my love for love (obviously), my love for stories, my love for the British accent and London, and my love for Christmas.

The scene that I am referring to is the best proposal EVER. And when I say that, it means a lot because I have been brainwashed completely and thoroughly by millions of proposal videos that I have watched (and wanted) over the years. I’m talking about the scene where Andrew Lincoln (Mark) proposes to Keira Knightley (Juliet) by holding up banners.

To be completely honest, this wasn’t my original blog idea. I was going down the clichéd road, as for me and many others this is the ideal proposal. Not that I wouldn't love it if someone proposed to me like this, but there is so much more to this scene than just that.

Whoever hasn’t seen the movie, she is married to his best friend and this confession is just a catharsis because he has been hiding his feelings all this while. At that moment, I did believe that love is pretty much amoral. I still do believe that, and if you see from his perspective, it was the right thing to do. It also takes so much courage to confess and not expect anything in return. Selfless love is after all a rarity.  

What I did not see was the utter confusion it causes in the person who you confess your love to. It is actually mind boggling, even if the person knows that the situation with her husband/partner isn’t going to change- especially if something is expected in return.

I felt the same kind of confusion when an ex boyfriend (who was a long term, serious boyfriend) confessed that he was still in love with me, almost a year after our breakup. I was dating my current boyfriend at that time, and I was very much in love so there was the decision was really a no-brainer, but the first thing I felt was an overwhelming sense of guilt. I didn’t know how I could “reward” him for having the courage to tell me.

Sacrifices and such things have always been (and still are) elusive concepts for me, but in that moment I knew sacrificial love existed. My ex said that didn’t want to get back with me, because he feared that he would hurt me again. All he wanted to do was tell me, and that is exactly what he did.

Maybe that was my saving point, and Kiera Knightley’s too because there was no demand from the other end. I didn’t have to make a choice, and that made the guilt pass sooner. Eventually, I felt wonderful, as if someone had secretly loved me, watched me while I was blissfully unaware of it- for six long years.