my thoughts in brown
be vs become → you want another person to help you become.
I suddenly understood that sometimes people are not so much in love as they are in need of an audience.
What was most compelling to me was the way the movie allowed the three men to pitch Tracy versions of her future by pitching her versions of herself. My friend Olivia once per fectly described The PS as: "Men explain Katharine Hepburn to Katharine Hepburn," and, indeed, this is the whole bag. She is described as a goddess, a queen, and a golden girl over the course of the movie, and we come to understand that if Tracy chooses one man over another, she will not only have a different life, she will be a different version of herself. She will become a different person.
For years I conflated tastes with identity, with depth. < tastes are just branches of a tree, roots (values) are what shapes them
By this same warped logic, I dated people whose interests I did not share but aspired to) I loved people who were more outdoorsy than me. People who knew more about art. People who were better at building and creating things with their hands than I was. As if through the transitive properties of dating, I, too, would become and learn these things
People are always trying to date people who have the same tastes as them. So you don't need to give up your things for theirs.
The assumption underlying Sean's good advice was that another person's identity would not have to become mine if we fell in love. That their identity would not subsume me.
conflating the choice of a romantic partner with the choice of one’s own identity.