Cool, I finally watched Blue Valentine and it shattered me.

This past week, I sorted through one of the gut-wrenching movies that has been on my ever-growing watch list.

I wrote an article a few months ago entitled “How Movies Heal Us,” getting lost in a truckload of research in the process. I loved every minute of it, but ever since that deep dive, my algorithm spits movie clips into my feed every three seconds.

In between ads for this coffee machine I’m flirting with and soup recipe reels, I get these incredibly potent and emotional movie clips thrown in my feed. They stop me in my scrolling tracks, and it takes little for me to immediately give a, “oooh, I wanna watch that” and save it to my bloated “movies” folder.

Scenes from the film, Blue Valentine, were the most frequent I was getting lately. Instagram really wanted me to watch this one and wouldn’t shut up about it.

Get a life, Meta. I’ll watch it when I watch it.

Starring Michelle Williams and our collective Canadian lover boy, Ryan Gosling, the clips of this film looked disgustingly sweet and heartbreaking, so I waited patiently for the day I found myself in the mood to blubber on my couch.

The day finally came, and I’ve been thinking about this movie ever since.

After the winter sun set at 3:05 pm, I rolled my body tequito-style into a blanket, flopped onto the sofa, and clicked play.

Blue Valentine depicts an honest rise and fall of a couple’s love as it jumps back and forth on the timeline of the present and the past. In our introduction to the characters, Cindy and Dean, we see the working-class couple married with a child, toiling through the daily annoyances of mundane living—getting up for work, making breakfast, getting the kiddo off to school, etc.

The movie goes on to trace the roots of how these two met, fell in love, and in the course of under a decade, how it all fell apart.

It’s chock-full of excruciatingly relatable tension—car ride arguments, miscommunication, accusatory passive aggression. As a viewer, there are moments you feel like you’re the kid in the back of the car uncomfortably watching mom and dad bicker, not knowing what to do but try to disappear into the fibers of your seat.

We get the whiplash of these scenes juxtaposed with their warm and enthralling beginnings—the discovery stage of meeting someone new, wanting to know everything about them, and being enamored that someone as wonderful as them exists at all, let alone in your orbit.

We also learn the origins of the two characters themselves.

We see Cindy’s overarching fear of becoming her parents—two people who she says “must have loved each other at one time,” but whose love disintegrated into a verbally abusive and violent home.

And we get to know Dean—an unambitious, but deeply affectionate and warm romantic who was abandoned by his mother at a formative age.

These early vignettes are so devilishly convincing. Even with their own set of painful pasts, surely the safety and affection found in a connection like theirs could withstand whatever life threw at them. But for all the chemistry and extravagant commitment we see between the two in the beginning, the film displays this truth with brutal honesty:

Compatibility, or the lack thereof, will always have the last say.

And this is something Hollywood romances chronically leave out.

Cindy’s grandmother told her this before she even met Dean. She cautioned her, “You gotta be careful with the person you fall in love is worth it to you.” She knew the ecstasy of being in love with someone wouldn’t be enough in the long run.

Blue Valentine is a tough love (no pun intended) depiction of how any level of connection between two people can fade with time, no matter how originally intoxicating.

Resentment is an eroding poison.

Contempt unchecked will work as quickly as it can to villainize your partner before they villainize you.

And, if you don’t do the work to disrupt the cycle inside, your longest-held fears about love will become self-fulfilling prophecies.

I’m not in the camp that love is always doomed, and I don’t take that as the message of this movie. In fact, I think in its scathing realism, this film deconstructs our societal notion of romance to replace it with something supremely more profound:

Imperfect, painful, messy, and meaningful real love.

Even through the torrent of the final scenes, I was still holding onto hope for this family. I have faith in people. I believe when given the tools, people can grow, restore, and evolve if they want to.

However, the hard truth presented by this film is while people may have the ability to make something work, they won’t always choose to.

Anything working out between two people is contingent on both parties’ willingness to be honest, to face their fears, and to stay. But sometimes staying isn’t what’s best. Sometimes whatever’s on the other side of “working it out” isn’t enough for one or both parties to put in the effort to reach it.

To echo Cindy’s grandma:

“You gotta be careful with the person you fall in love is worth it to you.”

I agree.

Contrary to the societal narrative we’ve been fed since birth, you’re going to suffer in life and in love no matter how right or wrong someone is for you. It’s unavoidable.

But you get to choose what and who makes life and love worth suffering for.

That’s what this movie depicts.

Thanks for the recommendation, Instagram. I never should’ve doubted you.