To All The Boys I've Loved ...

I bet you thought this was another letter. Got ya.

For those that don’t know or live under a rock or don’t really care, let me save you some brainpower; I’m talking about a movie … Jesus Christ, this movie. It made me feel so young again and I loved every minute of it. Took me back to the days before I’d experienced "love". Back when I’d only imagined what it felt like. And I really used to imagine it, I was such a “teenage dream” type of girl. Growing up, I loved reading and I used to always read those young teenage books where the story eventually became a movie and it really shaped the way I thought love was supposed to be.

Cut to: Now, that I’m older and I’ve actually experienced these things and I feel like it’s hardened my views or at least definitely woke me up from whatever dream-world I was living in. Let me tell you, nothing went as planned. I think everything played out the way it should have for me, but I could’ve never imagined it the way that it did.

After much observation, I’ve come to the understanding that the way our generation loves is just so much more different than the generations before us. We grew up on 90’s R&B and the early 2000’s hits which depicted love as beautiful but also super trifling. And so in turn, we’ve made it either super beautiful or super trifling.

Before my parents got divorced, I used to be such a hopeless romantic and it had nothing to do with their love story, I just didn’t know any better. I ate all of that movie stuff up and then all of a sudden, I became someone who ran from the idea of it.

Truth be told, I wanted no parts and when I finally got a taste, it scared me more than I knew what to deal with. It’s taken me until now, when I’m on the verge of 23 to start feeling like I have hope that love can be that cute again and this movie really just made me feel how I used to. Yeah, it’s a teeny bopper movie and realistically, we know that it’s “just a movie” – that situation would NOT have played out like that for me in high school ... At all (I always wanted the unattainable lol).

However, it was still nice to get out of my head and ignore my adult responsibilities to just enjoy that feeling of being that young and carefree again. Feeling like the whole world revolved around whether or not the boy you liked, liked you back. Spending all of your time listening to love songs and daydreaming about what could be. Like damn, we were really truly so dramatic about these things and now, it’s really all so trifling.

I saw this video circling Twitter the other day, where Jada Pinkett-Smith was talking about love and she said “relationships are a spiritual endeavor” and along with that, she captioned “Most of us come into relationships with a bunch of traumas and high expectations – which can be a painful mix because it’s our traumas and the false beliefs they create that keep us from offering our best to ourselves and others.” This movie was a reminder of all of the things that I once believed and how reality showed me something else.

In movies, they don’t show the depth of your trauma and false beliefs and high expectations, they show you all of the cute stuff with a dash of realism so it’s fantasy but believable at the same time. It’s supposed to kind of be an escape from reality, I get it. I just find myself now coming full circle where I understand why I looked at love the way I did and how things changed and how I got to my current state of understanding and it’s really eye-opening.

It all just made me think, don’t you miss the days before you “grew up”? The days before you finally realized that life doesn’t always cater to what you want and it either gives you a lesson or a blessing, but you don’t get a choice of which one. At the end of the movie, there was this conversation that really hit a spot for me. The main character Lara Jean and Peter finally admitted their feelings to each other and she said something along the lines of - “How do we do this? What do you put into a contract for a real relationship?” to which he replied “Nothing. You gotta trust.”  And I laughed but also felt a little nostalgic, because I couldn’t help but think to myself “if only it were that simple.”