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— Did you also find yourself unexpectedly Binge-watching Netflix’s One Day, and what did YOU take out of it?

— What did it say to you about relationships, and how we often misunderstand love?

— What are the foundations of a healthy kind of love?

Just when you think you know your own taste in TV shows, a fourteen-episode Netflix Rom-Com pops up and gets deep under your skin.

I lost a week binging One Day, the new bittersweet adaptation of David Nicholls’s 2009 bestseller. The film tracks the complicated love between Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) and Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) for two decades.

They hook up on the final day at Edinburgh University, July 15th, 1988, and then each episode intriguingly revisits them on that same day a year later. 

The format is genius. It allows us to see the broad arc of a relationship over decades, especially how power shifts between friendship and love as their fortunes rise and fall. It slowly sucks us in, requiring us to imagine what happens between each July rendezvous.

Like a Jane Austen chapter, each episode sets fresh obstacles for their relationship—new partners, weddings, children, addiction, the death of a parent—inviting us to switch our sympathies. Who’s to blame for this fight? Who is holding the relationship back? Are we still rooting for them? 

Although they botched the final episode (Emma Morley would have hated it; way too sickly sweet), I was hooked until then. Of course, all the British 90’s nostalgia helped: a killer soundtrack, college balls, lad culture, London pubs, and getaways to Greece, Italy, and Paris.

But for me, the real hook was its brutal dissection of love and how easily it can be misunderstood.

Sexy Dex and Serious Em are unlikely soul mates. They come from entirely different places—social background, race, gender, vocation. He lacks purpose and direction, while she takes life too seriously, and there are few signs of sexual chemistry between them.

Em resents the privilege that Dex was born with, and his lack of self-awareness, yet she still sticks with him as he loses a decade to narcissism and addiction. Their path from young love to adult love in the city is messy, even brutal.

Yet together, they find an equal footing over the years, and we are reminded that love is a journey, often painful and unpredictable but almost always worth it.

One Day’s dialogue is knowing and sharp.

“You’ve never seen me before in your life,” Em accuses Dex when they first meet, in a moment that foreshadows all of his narcissistic thoughtlessness.

In Episode 3, Dex lies on his back while Em’s head rests on his chest. In this moment he does see her:

“You know what I can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are. You know, smart and funny and talented and all that. I mean, endlessly. I’ve been telling you for years. So why don’t you believe it? Why do you think people say that stuff? Do you think it’s all a conspiracy? People secretly ganging up to be nice about you?”

Soon, they grow apart. Dex finds the fame and success he lazily pursues as a TV presenter, and his ego takes over. In an excruciating restaurant scene, Dex can’t stop looking over her shoulder for more interesting options, bored by her conversation, and she explodes on him outside in the alley:

"You used to make me feel good about myself. But now you make me feel like s**t. Like I’m not cool enough, or interesting enough or ambitious enough."

A few years later, life begins to catch up with Dex, triggering a journey of self-awareness:

“You know, if you’re 22 and f*****g up, you can say, “It’s okay. I’m only 22. I’m only 25. I’m only 28.” But 32…”

As he struggles through his thirties, they grow closer again as his marriage falls apart. When they finally get together, Em jokes “I just thought I’d finally got rid of you,” and Dex tells her what she already knows, “I don’t think you can.” Even after almost twenty years, their love holds a mysterious power over their lives. At this moment, they simply decide to stop resisting it or trying to understand it.

If Dex and Em’s lines sound familiar, perhaps it’s because we’ve said variations of them ourselves. If we’ve loved and lost, or left and tried to return, we have likely traveled through these emotions and had these conversations.

Perhaps if we’ve never said them, we haven’t loved yet.

Six ways we misunderstand love

The mysterious and ineffable power of love was captured poignantly eight hundred years ago by the Persian poet Rumi:

Out beyond all ideas of right and wrong,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’

don’t make any sense.

Dex and Em’s struggle to understand their love makes for compelling drama, but it also asks questions. Why does love so often overwhelm our senses? What can we expect from those who love us? And perhaps most interestingly, how do we misunderstand love?

First, what we typically call love is invariably just the start of love. It’s falling ‘in love’. We become experts in how love begins, but we know far less about how to sustain it. The first glance, words, kisses, and intimacy are preserved forever. We then long for the excitement and boundless opportunities of the first year and use them as a sharp stick to beat our relationship with in the fifth year, the tenth, and beyond. Comparing the inevitable joy of fresh intimacy with the equally inevitable challenge of making daily compromises is perhaps the definition of insanity.

Second, we say “I love you” when often we mean “I love love.” We crave the feeling of security and excitement when in love. Saying “I love you” is often a means to the end of being in love. At certain and unpredictable points in our lives, we crave reassurance that we are still lovable and that we can still make someone fall in love with us. Of course, we still buy the flowers and say “I love you”, but in truth, we can often still only love love, because we suspect we may never be lovable. 

Third and related, we confuse loving somebody with needing them to love us. If we truly see what someone needs, and we want to give it to them with no strings attached, that is the love that we should want. But if we only give our love in the expectation of getting the same or more back, it is something else.

As Eric Fromm writes, “Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence, the problem for them is how to be loved and how to be lovable.”

When the Italians say “Ti voglio bene,” sometimes abbreviated to TVB, it means “I want your good” or “I want what’s best for you.” TVB implies selfless, unconditional love - the kind of love we should aspire to be capable of. This love is caught sweetly in a few lines about the Sun and the Earth:

And still, after all this time,

The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe Me.”

Look what happens with

A love like that,

It lights the Whole Sky

—Author unknown, often misattributed to Hafiz

Fourth, love is neither permanent nor stable. This is perhaps the most dangerous misunderstanding to cope with. We can try to lock it up in legal agreements, ceremonies, romantic songs, and social norms, but nothing can stabilize love. The energy between two separate people, whose individual freedoms, wealth, urges, and dreams have been constrained, for better or worse, will always be dynamic. Love is alive, always thriving and dying.

The only antidote is for both partners to know this and stay clear-eyed and honest about the fact that they are not the relationship. The relationship is a separate, fragile, living thing. There are always three entities involved - each partner plus the relationship itself.

Fifth, nobody can escape the pain of being in love. To love is to risk heartbreak, but it is probably worth it. Nobody can guarantee they won’t hurt or get hurt, and they should be wary of such promises. If our intention is to live a full life and to slowly and patiently attain a deeper wisdom, then we can expect to endure love’s pain along the way. Herman Hesse and Margaret Atwood both wrote about this:

“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”

— Hermann Hesse

“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.”

― Margaret Atwood

Sixth, we cannot hope to change somebody in order to love them more. Think about the logic of trying this. You spend a lifetime searching for the right person, the perfect one, and then when you decide you’ve found them, you start trying to improve them. What was the point of searching so hard, if you’re now planning to bend them to your own preferences? It never works anyway. It’s far easier to change yourself than to try to change someone else, and then feel disappointed when they revert to who they are. 

In all these ways, and many more, love is misunderstood and likely to cause suffering and heartbreak. Perhaps three important principles emerge though: giving, freedom, and impermanence. A love that is rooted in these three soils is worth wanting.

Giving is saying, ‘Ti voglio bene,’ or ‘I want your good,’ and truly meaning it.

Freedom is cutting someone free unconditionally while continuing to support their dreams.

Impermanence is committing fully to a love that is neither stable nor guaranteed. 

If Dex and Em had rooted their love in giving, freedom, and impermanence, they might have lived happily ever after. But nobody wants to watch fourteen episodes of that TV show.

J. E. Chadwick

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