Love and Death Story Opinion

This might be taken to mean that a limitless future would allow for even more intensity to love than a limited one. Romantic love among immortals would open itself to an intensity that eludes our mortal race. After all, immortality opens an infinite future. And this would seem to be to the benefit of love’s passion. I think, however, that matters are quite the opposite, and that “Groundhog Day” gives us the clue as to why this is. What the film displays, if we follow this interpretive thread past the film’s plot, is not merely the necessity of time itself for love’s intensity but the necessity of a specific kind of time: time for development. The eternal return of “Groundhog Day” offered plenty of time. It promised an eternity of it. But it was the wrong kind of time. There was no time to develop a coexistence. There was instead just more of the same.
This is not true, however, and romantic love itself shows us why. Love is between two particular people in their particularity. We cannot love just anyone, even others with much the same qualities. If we did, then when we met someone like the beloved but who possessed a little more of a quality to which we were drawn, we would, in the phrase philosophers of love use, “trade up.” But we don’t trade up, or at least most of us don’t. This is because we love that particular person in his or her specificity. And what we create together, our common projects and shared emotions, are grounded in those specificities. Romantic love is not capable of everything. It is capable only of what the unfolding of a future between two specific people can meaningfully allow.
Sooner or later the paths that can be opened by the specificities of a relationship come to an end. Not every couple can, with a sense of common meaningfulness, take up skiing or karaoke, political discussion or gardening. Eventually we must tread the same roads again, wearing them with our days. This need not kill love, although it might. But it cannot, over the course of eternity, sustain the intensity that makes romantic love, well, romantic. Many readers will probably already have recognized that this lesson about love concerns not only its relationship with death, but also its relationship with life. It doesn’t take eternity for many of our romantic love’s embers to begin to dim. We lose the freshness of our shared projects and our passions, and something of our relationships gets lost along with them. We still love our partner, but we think more about the old days, when love was new and the horizons of the future beckoned us. In those cases, we needn’t look for Groundhog Day, for it will already have found us.