In 2016, not too long after Valentine’s Day, Netflix debuted one of its finest pieces, the television seriesLove. The brain child ofJudd Apatow(the man behindFreaks and Geeks,Knocked Up,The King of Staten Islandand so much more) andPaul Rust(best known for his starring role inI Love You Beth Cooper), the show was intended to be an honest look at modern relationships. The story is centered around the relationship between Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Rust) as they attempt to navigate the complexities of modern love.
Mickey is an alcoholic, a sex/love addict, and a drama junkie. She’s trapped in a cycle of decisions she knows are bad, doing things she doesn’t want to do, and stirring shit with people she loves. Gus on the other hand is awkward, emotionally-needy, and a “nice guy.” Not in the sense that he’s genuinely nice, but in the sense that he’s pretentious about being nice, keeping score of the favors he does and passive aggressively critiquing Mickey’s choices. They’re both bad people.
Traditionally, the love stories we tell in modern western media are concerned primarily with the will-they-won’t-they dynamic. That’s the driving force behind most rom-coms, behind most sitcoms, behind most romances; the will-they-won’t-they dynamic is a major reason why the love triangle exists, to throw drama and uncertainty into the otherwise predictable story arc. There are generally two types of endings for love stories in the modern world: The Ross-Rachel ending or the Jack-Rose ending. After establishing the will-they-wont-they dynamic, the characters either come together and live happily ever-after or they are separated by some tragic force out of their control, the story either wants you to cry tears of joy or sadness, but either way everything is simple and clean.
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Lovedoesn’t conform to either of these tropes. By the end of the first season it’s clear that Mickey and Guswill. In the final scene of the first season, Mickey pulls the classic rom-com move of pouring out your heart to the other lead and kissing them as we fade to black, suggesting that happily ever-after ending is coming. Yet, the episode is called “The End of The Beginning,” because at this point in production they already knew they were being funded for a second season. Designed into the series from the very beginning was a rejection of those surface level romance stories focused on “finding the right person.”
In our culture, largely because of how we present it in media, love is often portrayed as an uncontrollable feeling. One meets the right person and falls uncontrollably in love. The right person can fix everything, your insecurities will disappear because it’s just right for you, your lack of faithfulness will disappear because it’s just right for you, love is easy when you find the right person becauseIt’s. Just. Right!The reality, though, is so much more complex, nuanced, and (I think at least) interesting. Love is not simply a feeling; in large part it’s a verb. It’s an action one must engage with. Your problems as individuals don’t disappear because you click just right with someone, you work on them because you decide the other person is worth working on yourself for. You work through the relationship because you decide it’s worth it, not just because your heart tells you it’s worth it. That’s the verb, that’s the process of love — the actions you choose to take every single day.
This is fundamentally whatLovewas always designed to be. A rejection of the lies that rom-coms and dramas have told us for years. An embrace of love as a process, as something that takes hard work, and as something that’s worth working hard for. Mickey and Gus are both imperfect people. They’re both terrible partners. Mickey makes bad decisions and blows Gus’s words out of proportion as if trying to start fights. Gus is judgey, he always sits on a high horse, but in such a passive and hidden way that he can maintain plausible deniability and accuse Mickey of being crazy if she calls him out.
But when the two of them work hard to be better for each other, when they manage to work through their insecurities and do genuinely nice things for one another, when they surpass the people we expect them to be it’s so satisfying to watch. They’re not better people because they met the right person, but because they met a person they want to work hard to be better for.
One of the best examples of this is in Season 3, Episode 4, “I’m Sick." The episode opens with Gus about to have the best day of his life with his friends and Mickey being sick. Gus, out of fear that this is a test from Mickey, decides to go back and take care of her. Mickey, thinking she’s not contagious and just has food poisoning, ends up giving it to Gus and in the end they’re fighting while both sick in the bathroom. Mickey really was testing Gus. She was irresponsible about keeping track of how she got sick and really did get Gus sick too. But Gus also treated her like a chore and expected to be rewarded for doing the compassionate thing. In this episode, we see them struggle with the fact that being in a good relationship doesn’t always mean having good moments. Still, at the end of the episode in the climax of their fight, when they’re throwing horrible words at each other they suddenly stop and laugh. They’re both right about each other, they’re both at fault, but its not worth being angry about, they just need to work together to keep rising above. The other person can be a chore, not everything you do for them is going to feel good because you just love them so much. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing it for. Love is not only in saying “I love you,” but in doing the things you don’t really want to because the other person just needs you in that moment.
WhatLovedid differently is show us what it really means to be in love. It’s not a wonderfully simple and clean experience, in which you follow your heart and arrive at all the right choices. It’s hard work. It’s commitment when you don’t want to, it’s caring for another person when you feel like you can’t, it’s taking on each other’s emotional baggage together and working on it. There is no such thing as a person who has done enough work on themselves and is now ready to love someone else properly, as is often purported in romance stories or pop-psychology. Both working on oneself and loving someone else are eternal processes. There is no end goal, just the desire to make something work with someone you care about. In a lot of ways, I think that’s more compelling, more interesting, and more dramatic than the cliché ideas of love. In the nuanced understanding the stories are limitless, and the endings are all the more satisfying because our characters have to work so much harder to get to them. That’s whatLovedid differently.
