Valentine's Day Countdown: Not all love stories have happy endings.

I thought I would do something different this time. Instead of scenes I would just include a few unhappy love stories that I adore. They are the ones that make me cry and not the pretty type of crying like in Ghost with one tear falling so perfect. I'm talking the braying, nose plugged, eyes red and swollen and tons of used tissue crying. This is not a complete list by any means but it is good enough for the purposes of this countdown.

#4 Unhappily Ever After - The Bridges of Madison County, The Age of Innocence, The Thorn Birds and Titanic

All of these films are about love denied. They portray a love that is a wanting of something so much but not being able to have it, as it is out of reach for various reasons, unattainable and forever. These stories are the saddest and they are gorgeous in their sadness, they are EPIC. The separation can be from societal expectations, one of the lover's choice, death or distance but the pain is immutable. These are couples who yearn in vain for each other and they never forget, because despite time or distance they are irrevocably entwined.

It always starts the same way, with their meeting and they are like most everyone, each just going along with the paces of life. Blindly accepting things as they are, until that other person comes along, that other piece of the puzzle, and there is a seismic shift, the scales fall from their eyes. Something changes deep down inside them and once unsettled it can never quite revert back to what it was and therein lies the beauty and the pain.

It is Robert in The Bridges of Madison County who doesn't want to need Francesca. Because it is a need that he can never fulfill and the pain of that is unbearable. While she chooses to continue in her lonely life without dreams or passion, made worse by the fact that Robert brought her back to life. She'd been dead for years and hadn't even known it. It was the only way she could tolerate her unhappiness. 

It is Rose watching Jack slip beneath the waves in Titanic and vowing never to give up even while realizing that because he showed her what love is supposed to feel like that he is irreplaceable. So she goes on to live the life that she knows he would have wanted for her, even though much of the sweetness of it is lost without him to share it with her.

It is Newland telling Ellen that she gave him his first glimpse of a real life only to have her tell him to carry on with a false one in The Age of Innocence. To take that safe path into old age, which unfortunately he does. A life lived only on the surface with a woman who has no depth of feeling and no imagination, whose very placidity hides a chilling emptiness.

It is Meggie Cleary telling Ralph in The Thorn Birds that from the day their eyes first met that she has always known that even if she never saw him again that the last thought she would have this side of the grave would be of him. She says that there is nothing she can do to change it and asks if he knows how terrifying that power he wields over her is. But he loves his ambition more and she has no place there.



None of these lovers end up together on the physical plane, at least.  But it is their journey together, the experiences they share, the bonds that are formed that stick to you as you watch and hope against hope that the obstacles can be overcome. That somehow they can be together, if only that one thing could be different. Love and tragedy have been around as long as man could tell stories. The star-crossed pairs from Tristan and Isolde to Romeo and Juliet to Rick and Ilsa to Sarah Connor and Reese. All who loved a lifetimes worth in a few hours, a few days, weeks or years. But to them never enough. Nor to those of us who share their journey with them as they blaze across the screen.