Right off the bat I am going to say that I am old enough to be your grandmother or even your great grandmother….so my review comes with having lived this myself. Both as the ML and the FL.

When a child never has had any love bestowed upon them to speak of, they carry that burden with them perhaps their whole life. The kind of love that is needed in a committed relationship needs to be taught to a child throughout the time they live at home…or they enter the outside world with no real knowledge of what it means to love. The ML suffers from that to some extent. He finds it hard to take the next step….to reach out….for fear of being abandoned. It is seen, quite often that children like this, becoming adults, will often use sex to get close to someone….it is their version of love and it holds less danger to them emotionally. I know this to be true for that was me, well into my 30’s.

However, we see that the ML is gentle and kind to the FL…..he is always honest with her…he doesn’t make promises he cannot keep. But through lack of training as a child….he doesn’t know how to take the next step from sex to expressing love on a wider spectrum. He tells her right from the start what he would like the relationship to be….he asks her many times if what they are doing is okay with her. When he is with her…..he gives her his full attention. He is a gentle lover in bed. At some point early on he falls for her but he doesn’t know what to do next and he founders.

The FL is mentally and emotionally deranged. She is what we call a basket case. She really shouldn’t be in a relationship. She has too much baggage. She doesn’t love or trust herself and therefore she doesn’t know how to love or trust someone else. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen in my long time friends that the type of behavior shown by the FL, in real life, has damaged young men so traumatically from the push pull, emotionally blackmailing, demanding type of behavior that they never quite recover and carry a mistrust of women their whole life.

She is really unkind to him. And he just stands there and takes it. He doesn’t make nasty comments back to her. She continually tells him to leave her alone….then has a snit when he does. She does this in so many ways…I relate to this on a very deep level…..I was that woman for a very long time myself and I destroyed several relationships with my mistrusting suspicious behavior.

Then instead of taking some time to heal from leaving him, she instead jumps into another relationship….she says to herself at one point “Am I cheating”. Yes, you are. You know this other man is in love with you but you don’t care, you just string him along and make rationalizations to yourself. I’ve done that too. So you hurt the SML in the same way that you accused the ML of.

I know its a movie….but I kept thinking to myself….it is clear to anyone that the ML is head over heels in love with her…he is always sincere with her…and he never lies to her. How can she not see it? The truth is that she feels unworthy of love…here is this handsome, sweet man, and she feels unworthy and she projects that insecurity constantly.

I want to say something about the situation where she thought he was having an affair. In a relationship…you need to trust the other person. If they say “no” then trust them. Don’t spend hours, days or weeks throwing it back up to them. If you feel you can’t trust what they say then the only option is to leave the relationship. If someone is a quiet person like he is, respect that. He wasn’t a coward….he just didn’t see the need for hour long discussions. See, the main problem here was she was trying to remake him into what she wanted him to be….and didn’t care about who he really was. Did she ever take the time to actually get to know him? No. It was all about her. In every scene, even at the end, it was still all about her. She is living a self-fulfilling prophecy. If her main thought is this won’t work, I’ll be unhappy then she has already programmed the relationship to fail.

And lastly, they were young adults. I don’t see any thing wrong with his behavior that he was dating and bedding as many women as he wanted to. He was always nice and considerate to all of them. And after doing so for a long time, he finally found someone that he was ready to commit to. Is that wrong? I don’t think so.

Please….do not keep throwing up “old baggage” to the other person in a relationship. It will destroy the relationship.