Love Is Not Love: Oh Willoughby!

Spoiler warning! Do not read if you have not read Sense & Sensibility or seen the movie!

Remember Marianne's heartbreak in Sense and Sensibility, the "OH Willoughby!" scene? In my younger days, after each experience of being made a fool by "love", I would recall Marianne and watch her in this movie, this scene, and it would ease my heartsickness. I was Marianne, crying out to Willoughby in the rain, quoting her Shakespeare, utterly shaken! (Dramatic I know, but dramatic is what I am!) It made me feel better! After these "Willoughby" mishaps, all you really find out is what love isn't. Then you must pick up and keep on searching. Shakespeare, Jane Austin, Kate Winslet....all my heroes!

Shakespeare knew true love! One of my favorite sonnets (all because of this movie):

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Here's my favorite actress, in my favorite scene, from my favorite movie, from my favorite book! Love is not love....that looks on tempests and is never shaken!