Love. Don't ya just, erm, love it? It's that emotion we all aspire to experience at least once in our lives, it's that emotion that has kept novelists, filmmakers, TV storytellers, and songwriters inspired and motivated for eons. We all seem to love love.
When I was writing Goodnight, Beautiful I was confronted with having to reassess my views on love. Well, actually my beliefs on the things we do for love and the things we do in the name of love. There's a difference between the two, I discovered, a very subtle one but one that exists all the same.
In the book, Nova agrees to have a baby for her closest friend, Mal, and his wife, Stephanie. Nova is incredibly moved by the couple's situation, and decides to overcome her worries about surrogacy and to carry a baby for them. That, I think, is doing something for love. Admittedly, it's a pretty huge thing but that is love. She puts them first, despite what it might do to her personally because she wants what is best for them and to make them happy.
Also in the book Mal's wife, Steph, becomes paranoid about Mal and Nova's relationship. Because she doesn't want to lose her husband, she asks him to cut all ties to Nova and the longed-for unborn child because she doesn't want to risk the surrogacy ending their marriage. That, I believe, is doing something in the name of love. She has many motivations for what she does, but in her mind it is justified because she can bundle up all those fearful reasons and package it as doing it for 'love'.
I think we've all behaved like Nova and Stephanie at some point in our lives. We do something - even something that costs us personally - because we love someone so much we have to do it. And, we do other things that are motivated by less positive emotions - jealousy, fear of being alone, worry, resentment, etc - but tell ourselves we're behaving that way because we love the other person.
That's an uncomfortable thought that I was constantly experiencing as the book progressed. That we eagerly hide behind love when our motives for doing something are less than pure. In such instances, it is a case of hiding our tainted reasons behind the word love because a loving act is only truly loving if it's carried out unconditionally.
In other words, it doesn't count if you, for example, felt disgruntled because you didn't get something in return, if you had a nagging feeling that you didn't behave particularly well, or if you later brought up how you did this amazing thing and they didn't even say thank you and did they realise how much effort you went through to do that for them and they didn't even notice, they just expected you to do it . . . You get the idea. Yup, we're all guilty of doing things in the name of love.
However, only a saint could spend all day every day doing things simply for love and not allowing other emotions to seep in once in a while - and very few of us are going to be beatified, or even nominated for the position any time soon.
And if there's one thing I came away from the whole experience of writing Goodnight, Beautiful with, it is that as long as our acts of unconditional love heavily outweigh the things we do in the name of love, and we don't harm other people or ourselves with those acts we carry out in the name of love, then we'll all be all right. We'll still be able to think of ourselves as good, loving people.
Love. Don't ya just, erm, love it? It's that emotion we all aspire to experience at least once in our lives, it's that emotion that has kept novelists, filmmakers, TV storytellers, and songwriters inspired and motivated for eons. We all seem to love love.
