Do you believe in the existence of love? Perhaps, many people have the answer in their hearts, but they are just not sure because of the expectations in their hearts or because of the experiences they have had. If this is the case, then let’s consider another question: what should love look like in your heart? If you are still unable to give a clear answer, then please don’t be forced to draw a conclusion to the first question, because you may not know what love is.

Recently, I accidentally watched a film called Midnight Sun, which honestly does not have a high rating (7.2 on Douban) and has a particularly simple plot. The main character, Katie, grew up with a rare form of pigmented dry skin (like the main character in the film The Others and the play Song of the Sun, exposure to sunlight causes skin cells to atrophy, leading to neurological damage or malignant tumours). For this reason, Katie has to hide at home during the day, and only after the sun goes down can she start to live a normal life. During the long dark years, the most beautiful thing she can look forward to each day is a young boy (Charlie) passing briefly in front of her house, and as an adult, she inadvertently meets and falls in love with Charlie.

This is a film that, after watching it, I felt the presence of love so clearly that I had the idea to write this essay, based on the film Midnight Sun, to explore the appearance and existence of love.

In terms of the feelings that emotions give: those emotions that bring you strength and courage may be love.
In Midnight Sun, young Katie always wakes up from the same dream – a dream in which the warmth of the sun, her mother’s arms and the songs she plays on her guitar fill her warmest, most desperate longing, but dreams are dreams.

As a result, Katie lived a very different life to others her age, unable to go to school and living in a room with a special glass window, sleeping during the day and only having a short period of freedom at night.

Fortunately, Katie was not alone in this state; Katie’s father loved her very much, and she was accompanied by her best friend Morgan, so Katie’s childhood memories are basically made up of nights, her father, Morgan and music (influenced by her mother).

But while her dad and Morgan’s company brought Katie some warmth and laughter, the dull, monotonous and confined life was still painful until one morning when Katie overheard a young boy (Charlie) briefly passing by through her room’s window and her “heart pounded” in anticipation of tomorrow – just to see Charlie pass by again.

At the time, when I saw this scene in the film, I was inadvertently reminded of the scene in another film, Throbbing, where Julie meets Bryce as a child.

It is difficult to give a convincing answer to the question of whether love exists, but in fact, not only this question, but probably similar questions about what love is and what it should be like, are rarely answered with certainty. This is not only because few people can truly understand the true meaning and nature of love, but also because love is full of infinite possibilities and has countless ways of being interpreted, and the film Midnight Sun gives us, to a certain extent, a way to understand love in depth – to understand and distinguish it from the feelings it gives us. To understand and distinguish love.

Love has always been an emotion that brings beauty and happiness, and it has the power to make a person “go from being a poor boy with nothing to a mysteriously rich man” (The Great Gatsby), to have “a strong will to escape the circle of schizophrenia” (A Beautiful Mind), and to “spend half a century waiting for a love that may not come” (Love in the Time of Cholera).

It may not be that all love brings hope and expectation, but this does not prevent us from identifying as love the emotions that bring us hope, expectation and other good wishes and strengths, after all, we seek love in order to obtain goodness, so why is it not love if it can satisfy our needs accordingly?

So, no matter how many ways love can be interpreted, no matter how many different faces it has, if there is a person or a relationship that can bring you the strength to be positive, the courage to resist pain, to face up to darkness and hardship, then this could be love.

In terms of emotional motivation: the emotions that make you go out of your way can also be love
There is a peculiar phenomenon about love: those emotions that we believe to be love are likely to develop into love, and those that we don’t believe to be love are likely to be missed even if they are love, which means that love, to a large extent, depends on our own perceptions and feelings.

And by what do we judge whether what we encounter is love or not?

Perhaps it is likely to depend on what love drives us to do, that is, what drive the emotion brings to us, and thus, gives us an initial judgement on whether the relationship is love or not.

Why this is so, to give a simple example.

If a relationship makes you indifferent, then it is difficult to identify it as love; if a relationship makes you “reckless” and involuntarily do something whether you want to or not, we can easily interpret it as love. How can we say that it is not love? Like Eileen Chang’s “willingness to sink into the dust and blossom out of it”, how can we say that it is not love? “If these are not love, then what magic should love have?

A judgmental definition of love in psychology is “whether it comes from the heart and helps the loved one to do all that is expected of him or her”. Based on this definition, we can then understand love in a different way – true love (what we think of as love) is that which gives us the motivation to do everything willingly for it.

Let’s go back to the film Midnight Sun, where as an adult Katie happens to meet Charlie while playing a song at a train station at night, and the feelings that arise from their subsequent relationship could be love – after all, in the film’s plot description, Katie hides the fact that she is ill for the sake of this relationship, puts herself in danger for the sake of this relationship, and inadvertently misses going home on a date for the sake of this relationship It is also for the sake of this relationship that she eventually dies when her condition deteriorates, choosing to sail the sea with Charlie in the sun. And it is for this affection that Charlie, too, overcomes his fear of swimming and, because of it, is rejuvenated about life.

Of course, to judge love in this way is not necessarily love in the full sense of the word, but mostly just what one thinks love is, and what it might breed, because often the love we believe in – the feelings that can make us rise to the occasion – may not be love, but may well be deliberate on the part of the other person throwing themselves at it (The First The love that we believe in – the love that makes us go out of our way – may not be love, but it may be a deliberate attempt by the other party (the use of Gwilym in The First Incense). Many times true love is always let down, when we give our heart to the wrong person, and many times true love is always missed, when we miss out on love that was true because we didn’t believe in it.

Therefore, we must first believe in love, and secondly, we must remain absolutely rational, because only in this way can we meet true love.

Three questions of the soul on love, based on a deep reflection on love
In literature and art, there are countless topics on the subject of love that can be discussed in depth, especially after reading the last two paragraphs, when most people are probably in a state of deep thought about the emotion of love, and it is in this deep thought that we might explore some more questions about the soul of love.

Should we love each other when love has no future in sight? Is it the end or the process that counts in love? What do we love for?

Reflecting on these three questions of the soul will help us to understand love more deeply. It is possible that different people will have different answers to these three questions, that there may be some who do not have clear answers to them, and that there may be others who have discovered an underlying connection between them: the latter question is the perfect entry point for the former.

In this article, it is not intended to provide answers to these three questions, as there may well be no single answer, and over-answering would rather mislead the reader, but here, it can give you a direction to think about and help you get your own answers.

In the film Love Before Dawn Breaks, the protagonists Jesse and Selena are faced with the three questions above. Jesse and Selena, two complete strangers, meet on a train, they have a brief chat and develop a crush on each other, they live in different countries, they don’t know each other at all, if they have feelings for each other, there is no future in sight, it is unknown whether they might have feelings for each other, and it is not even clear whether their brief crush is love, in such a situation, they have to think deeply about The three questions of the soul above.

But in the end, Jesse is brave enough to ask Selena to get out of the car midway, because he doesn’t want to leave regrets in his future life, and doesn’t want to create problems for his future emotions (the existence of regrets is likely to create an infinite number of beautiful imaginations, which will affect the reality of emotions), and doesn’t even consider whether there will be a future or what to love for.

The future we see may not be real and accurate, and how love will develop is unknown. Whatever the reason for love, it doesn’t matter why, what matters is the degree of love in the heart, so just go with the flow, do your best and leave no regrets, which is, of course, Jesse and Selena’s choice.

In the film Midnight Sun, on the other hand, Katie doesn’t actually think too much about these issues, she doesn’t think about why she fell in love with Charlie, she doesn’t think about whether her feelings for Charlie are love or not, and she doesn’t think about the future of the relationship, she just wants to follow her heart and thoroughly enjoy all the good that the relationship could bring, leaving no room for error and defying the odds to do so, and although it doesn’t end happily, there are no regrets for Katie, on the contrary, it may well have been fulfilled, and of course, that is just Katie’s choice.

Exactly how you would answer the above question depends on your attitude towards love, but what is clear is that as long as there are no regrets left and no future regrets, that is a good one, but of course, your choice, your attitude, to a large extent also determines your love.

At this time, looking back at the question at the beginning of the article, perhaps you already have an answer in your mind.