Love, Actually

Celebrate the month with an everyday nod to everyday romance

Written by MARIE SPEED

t’s Valentine’s Day this month, and it only made sense that when we asked some of our friends what their ideas of romantic movie scenes were (page 30), the answers were immediate. Everybody knows movie scenes that make them choke up. Or sigh. Or melt completely. Like Robert Redford washing Meryl Streep’s hair on safari in “Out of Africa.” Or Ingrid Bergman telling Humphrey Bogart he has to “think for the both of them” in “Casablanca.”The moment Mr. Darcy tells Elizabeth Bennett at dawn on a drizzly windswept moor that she has “bewitched” him.

No wonder we’re all a mess when it comes to relationships. Who can compete with Rhett Butler?

Don’t get me wrong; I am all for romance (most of us are), but as time goes by, I find myself becoming more awestruck by the kind of love people nurture every ordinary and sometimes desperate day of their lives—without even thinking about it. The ones who volunteer at senior centers or food banks every Wednesday, the ones who help with homework after working all day or go to every high school football game, even though their kid never sees a minute of playing time.

Women like the “Lunch Lady Squad” at Wellington Middle School, who post TikTok videos of themselves dancing like J.Lo because they love the kids who file through that cafeteria. Or Jack the Bike Man in West Palm Beach, who works all year repairing and donating thousands of bikes to poor kids.

There are those who pack up and move every few years because of a spouse’s job and never make a big deal about it, or those who prop up a friend whose heart is broken. Again. Those who sit vigil, week after week, when someone is sick (and getting sicker) so they do not feel alone. Or those who just show up, every day, tending to a routine and tedious marriage full of leftovers and laundry—but knowing, somehow, that it’s worth it, that it’s actually bigger than both of you.

There’s no romance in figuring out how to send your kids to college, or in watching someone play Fortnite in his Gator sweats. She’s not exactly Margot Robbie when she’s fighting those Spanx like a bandit. But here it is. The romance that never makes it to the big screen, the Frances McDormand of heroines, the Ned Beatty of princes.

People call Valentine’s Day a “Hallmark holiday,” and of course it is, but it’s also a modest opportunity to pay a little homage to these people, the ones with a lead role in your life, the longtime partner or spouse whose sentences you can finish, the person who sticks up for you at work, the one who is always there, no matter what you may need. You may not hear the music swell, and your heart may not flutter, but I have a feeling this is where love is.

And that trumps romance any day of the week.