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For my entire life, romantic Love was supposed to last forever. That was the goal:
Find "the one."
Fall in Love.
Live happily ever after.
Fade to Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle singing "A Whole New World."
Let me tell you, Disney movies really did a number on a young girl's psyche.
However, my personal experience with Love didn't match the fairy tale. No, Love was fleeting and temporary; Love didn't stay.
A scene in Richard Linklater's Before Sunset captures this perfectly. Céline, played by Julie Delpy, delivers a line that encapsulates my cynicism:
It's funny ... every single one of my ex's ... they're now married! Men go out with me, we break up, and then they get married! You know, I want to KILL them!! Why didn't they ask ME to marry them? I would have said, “No,” but at least they could have asked!!
I was just a stop along the way, a bridge to the next Love—part of someone's journey but never their final destination.
Before Sunset itself exists as a bridge. The middle chapter in Linklater's Before Trilogy spans eighteen years and multiple countries. In the first film, Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline are strangers who share one magical night in Vienna, promising to meet again in six months. Nine years later, Before Sunset finds them reuniting in Paris, each having built separate lives—Jesse with a wife and child, Céline with her career and boyfriend.
Their day-long, real-time conversation through the streets of Paris becomes a walking meditation on adulthood, our choices, and how life experience colors our connection to Love. Throughout the film, we see how even though their night in Vienna was fleeting, it set them on a path to find each other again, albeit nine years later.
The Lover as guide
"I feel I was never able to forget anyone I've been with. Because each person has...their own specific qualities. You can never replace anyone. What is lost is lost."
Céline in Before Sunset
Every person I've loved or thought I loved brought something unique and irreplaceable into my life: one carried a deep calmness that could weather any storm, even when that storm was me. Another possessed such devotion to their art that it inspired me to try an art of my own (Watercolors. I was awful and will never speak of this again.) A third moved through life with infectious mischief that changed how I saw the world.
These qualities can never be replicated, nor should they be. What is lost is lost, but what is gained can change you.
These are the boons of the adventure that is Love. When referring to relationship baggage, we typically refer to it negatively. We should refer to it as a boon. Yes, we've loved and lost. Yes, we have wounds, but we also know more about who we are. Let me be more of myself with you. Let me show up as cynical as Céline and cautiously hopeful as Jesse.
What is lost is lost, but what is gained can change you. These are the boons of the adventure that is Love.
Romantic Love isn't the end-all and be-all, but perhaps we're drawn to it because of the knowing that you will never be the same. You can't ignore the Call, even if you know pain could be on the other side. Like Joseph Campbell says in Pathways to Bliss:
Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco.
But there's also the possibility of bliss. (133)
The lovers' walk
"Walking Each Other Home" is a phrase often used to discuss how to guide the dying, but isn't love itself a series of deaths and rebirths?
Each new connection offers the possibility of life-giving transformation, and every ending holds a necessary grief that reshapes us.
From Jesse and Céline's first meeting to their walk through Paris nine years later, we witness this cycle of death and rebirth.
Céline and Jesse lament how romantic they were when they first met but how time and life have made them more cynical. Yes, the naive lovers they were are no more, but now, as the more actualized adults they've become, they allow for another form of Love to be born.
And the harsh truth is that meeting "the one" and living happily ever after will end in two ways: you break up or you don't. And if you don't, eventually, one of you will leave this earthly plane for another. There will still be a separation.
Grief either way.
No happy ending
"The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved."
Could the one ending Campbell speaks of be the “happy” ending?
Every Love who has entered my life has initiated a disintegration, an undoing of who I thought I was. A death or separation from who I was before and a rebirth into someone new, with the wounds and boons to show for it.
I can only hope I've done the same for them.
Understanding that I was part of their journey and they were part of mine doesn't diminish our time together because it didn't last forever. If anything, the ephemerality of these connections makes them more precious. The Love expressed, the trials endured, the knowledge gained, and even the grief over the end were all essential steps in becoming.
Before Sunset ends ambiguously—we don't know what choices Jesse and Céline will make, and that's the point. Love resists our attempts to contain, predict, and control its outcome. It's messy, terrifying, frustrating, and glorious, and still, we ask, do I dare?
Before Sunset shows us that Love and the Lover can't be stagnant or controlled but, the Lover will bring us exactly where we need to be, always guiding us home to ourselves.
When, or if, I meet "the one," I hope I don't hold them too tightly.
Let us meet again and again.
Let us grieve who we were and celebrate who we are becoming.
Let's take a walk together and see how we change.
MythBlast authored by:
Torri Yates-Orr is an Emmy-nominated public historian passionate about making history and mythology engaging, accessible, and informative. From exploring her genealogy to receiving a degree in Africana Studies from the University of Tennessee, the history was always her first love. Combining her skill set in production with her love of the past, she started creating history and mythology lessons for social media. Her "On This Day in History" series has over two million views. She's the content curator for the MythBlast newsletter for The JCF and co-host of the Skeleton Keys podcast.
This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Lover.
Latest Podcast
This bonus episode, recorded at WNYC TV in 1963, was part of the “Myth, Mask, & Dream” lecture series. In this episode, Campbell explores the mythological significance of the “Mother Goddess” across the Neolithic, Bronze, and early Iron Ages. Please note that the audio quality improves approximately 10 seconds into the lecture.
This Week's Highlights
"Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love – and I mean love, not lust – is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real human peeks through, say, "This is a challenge to my compassion." Then make a try, and something might begin to get going."
-- Joseph Campbell