Love Story

"Love means never having to say you're sorry."

Having read Erich Segal's Love Story this week, I now know where the expression comes from.

Spoliers: The story is about a young man and woman who fall in love. Obviously. It's set in the late sixties, starting out in Harvard and ending in NYC. This guy and girl meet in college. He's a IV, Olliver Barrett IV to be exact, who comes from a long line of wealthy, brilliant athletes. She (Jennifer Cavilleri) is a very intelligent, Italian muscian whose dad is a baker from the wrong side of town. Their relationship develops quickly and slightly confusingly, except that it is clear from the book that it is not confusing to them, which makes it more believable to the reader. They get married, he gets disowned. They scrape by being poor for awhile until he gets a job with a law firm. She gets sick and dies before they are even 25. That's basically it.

 I read the book in the first place because it's been popping up in various films I've seen lately, and I gathered it had some kind of significant role in 1970s culture.
I usually get lost attempting a book review because I have too much to say and it's hard to organize my thoughts into a blog post that I have limited time to write. I can do this one though, because I only  have to say a couple of things about it.

One, it was a fast read. Compelling in a way, because of a unique yet strangely choppy writing style and  dialouge. It read kind of like a journal, with certain descriptive language that is used in an inappropriate-but-I-kind-of-get-it-way.
I definitely found it easy to pick up and hard to put down. I read it on kindle, so I don't know how many pages it is, but I couldn't have spent more than a couple of hours of my life on reading the whole thing.

That being said, I was dissappointed that the only culturally significant find which jumped out to me was "Love means never having to say you're sorry."  I mean, I guess I was just hoping for something more. Maybe I just missed the mark. Is Erich saying that when you love someone you'll forgive anything, because they're part of you, and you will accept whatever? Because if what is meant is that "Love means never expecting someone else to say they're sorry" I get that.
 However, I think love requires that people have the guts and the humility to admit their own humaness and ask for forgiveness when they do something wrong. Otherwise, if people never admit what they do wrong, you get into all kinds of issues from minor to major.
 Just an opinion. I think love means volunteering heartfelt  "sorries" when you have hurt someone, out of respect and willingness to meet in the middle. I just don't really agree with the one attempted really deep thought in this book.Also, it is made even worse by the fact that the main chcaracters aren't even very nice or respectful to one another. They cuss each out all the time. I guess that's supposed to be "modern" or something.

Also, you'd think that the ending would be really depressing, but it didn't really make me that sad. I didn't really care for the characters or their relationship. They mostly just yelled at each other a lot. I mean, I was sad for the guy, because he obviously loved her. However, normally, I-the reader-would be sad for the loss of a character if that character seemed admirable to me or made me think about something new. However, that just wasn't really the case with this book.

I feel really guilty about this because I know this book is supposed to be really famous and profound. I was expecting to come away from reading this it a bettered individual. However, this one just left me without making much of an impression. I don't know guys, what do you think?

In other news, I just saw this movie trailer (starring Downton Abbey's Sybil- my favorite character!) and I am going to read the book before I see the film with high hopes of greater romance. I guess I'm on a love story kick. But watch this trailer....
Winter's Tale Trailer