Dearest. There are no accidents and we would have found us one way or another. Everything comes full circle. Be grateful it was sooner rather than later. You’ll think it harsh of me to say so, but no explanation I offer will satisfy you. Please don’t be angry when I tell you that you seek resolutions and explanations because you’re young. But you will understand this one day. And when it happens, I want you to imagine me there to greet you, our lives stretched out ahead of us, a perpetual sunrise. But until then, there must be no contact between us. I have much to do, and you, my darling, even more. Please believe that I would do anything to see you happy. So, I do the only thing I can… I release you. _Carol

 

Love is attention. Love is selfish. Love is understanding. Love is selfless.

If anyone asked me how I define love, or how I measure the depth of it, I don’t think I could answer right away. Before watching this movie, I probably would have answered ‘As much as I want to be with the person.” But isn’t that selfish? To love someone because you need them?

How do we define true love? Love exists on different spectrums, and maybe the definition of love is different for everyone. But if you truly love someone, you need to try to give them what they define as love. If that’s understanding, you need to try to understand them, be there for them when they need someone to understand them. Love is selfless in that sense.

 

Love is also knowing. When you love someone, you want to know them. You want to know everything about them—you want to hear their thoughts, learn what they like and hate. Everything about them becomes interesting to you. Does love begin to fade when you stop wondering about that person?

Some people have expectations of their loved ones and believe they truly love them because they fit the image of who they define they should love. But isn’t that just fitting someone into the mold you already have in your mind? Isn’t that love for convenience? What happens when your idea of perfect love changes, as everything on Earth eventually does?

If you truly love someone, you need to release them to be themselves. You may want to know everything about them and find every part of them fascinating, but you also need to allow them the freedom to exist as they are. you are interested in everything about them but you need to be able to let them be. Like Carol did—she released Therese once she believed she was pulling Therese into a painful situation and saw how tormented Therese had become by the feeling that she was somehow useless to her. Although Carol’s decision was also influenced by her divorce case and the custody battle for her daughter, she remained deeply interested in what Therese thought and loved. She observed her carefully and wanted to make her happy by giving her the things she genuinely liked. But never did she try to change her to fit her own preferences or expectations, the way the men in the film did.

Men loved Carol or Therese for being their ideal type of wife or girlfriend. But they never truly understood what Carol and Therese wanted, what made them happy, or who they really were.

Love is selfish in the sense that you want to be with someone because you need them. There may be void or boredom in your life, and you want to fill it with that person you love or the byproducts of loving them give you. But if your sense of completeness depends entirely on possessing someone, then you cannot truly let them be free. It’s counterintuitive to the wholeness one can achieve by being oneself. Does that make love selfish to want to fill whatever void in your life with the person you love?

 

 

Carol and Terese were feeling the void in their lives without even realizing it existed, or knowing how to fill it, until they found each other across a department store—everyone else blurred except for each other, as if the whole world had briefly disappeared. They filled something in each other that had long been hollow, bringing meaning to lives that had quietly grown barren. Love blossomed like a warm tunnel of light in the middle of a cold winter landscape.

Love is also selfless because you want to change to be what your love needs. You want to understand them and take the time to know them, learn them to be what they need.

Carol’s husband never took the interest to learn what makes Carol happy or what she wanted. He started getting obsessed about her once he found out that Carol is not the ideal type of wife he thought she was by cheating on him with her best friend Abby. Is that just different spectrum of love because love is inevitably selfish?

Magical love like Carol and Terese had in the movie ‘Carol’ has the components of the relationship where they fill each other’s void like puzzle. They were the pieces they have been looking for without realizing they are looking for it. They were the pieces of the puzzle that finally finished it and solved all the mysteries that troubled them and realize their life itself is a beautiful photo. They grow by being with each other. Carol accepts who she is even giving up the custody of her daughter from hiding and denying who she is for her divorce suit. Terese becomes proactive in pursuit of what she wants from letting everything happen to her without saying no. It is beautiful to watch two different individuals find each other and becoming their true selves by being with each other. That is true love.

Sometimes fate comes find you like it’s flung out of space to love you in different forms. Like Jim and Eleven from Stranger Things, it seems miraculous they found each other but at the same time it was meant to be. They were the last dots for each other to connect and finish the story. They needed each other and only each other could fill the void in their lives.

This also implies how magical and miraculous to find your loved one. Life is complicated and love has many pre-conditions. You give each other what each other defines as love. You can be yourself with your love and your true self is what your love wants and desires. How hard is it to meet all these qualifications? And as your love develops, it becomes harder to not get attached to the love and your loved one. Everything changes including your love and your loved one. That’s when we need to be selfless and let them be who they are, changed or not.

But what if they change to be who you don’t define as your loved one like Carol did to her husband? If Carol’s husband accepted her as who she is and showed her selfless, agape love, would things have changed? My query for true love didn’t finish with the movie.

Certainly, Carol was a sad and beautiful movie that could question us what we define as love.