500 days of summer is a 2009 romantic comedy starring Zooey Deschanel as Summer and Joseph Gordan-Levitt as Tom, a “couple” of sorts who meet while working at a greeting card company in New York.
Summer is just looking for a casual arrangement, but that doesn’t stop Tom from imagining something different and falling in love anyway.
500 days of summer it’s funny and touching, but most of all it’s a fairly realistic portrayal of what happens when expectations don’t meet reality. But most of all, it shows the inevitable heartbreak that occurs when someone falls in love with an idea, ignores the warning signs, and isn’t true to their heart.
500 days of summer is still extremely relevant in 2024. Therefore, hHere are seven lessons 500 days of summer which are still in force today.
1. Be honest about what you want. Both with the other person AND myself.
If you don’t want to be loose, don’t say you don’t mind going with the flow.
While playing house, kissing and flirting at IKEA, Summer tells Tom that she’s not looking for anything serious. In other words, she doesn’t want a relationship. (With him.) Tom agrees and says there’s nothing wrong with it.
Spoiler alert: It was not. However, Tomek tries to convince himself otherwise. At one point, when Tom’s best friends McKenzie and Paul ask who Tom and Summer are in terms of etiquette, Tom scoffs, claiming that etiquette is juvenile and that’s the way of modern dating. His friends look at this skeptically, and they are right. After all, Tom is a certified hopeless romantic who believes in soul mates and that he will never be truly happy until he finds “The One.” And as the film goes on, this becomes more and more apparent. Because Tomek does to want relationship; relationship With Summer. Not casual. Not something situational. A full-fledged, committed relationship.
Warning, spoiler two: This never happens.
On that note…
2. If someone says they don’t want a relationship, be careful their.
Even though Summer leads Tom at times throughout the film, the truth is that it’s her he did fully and firmly communicate that she was not looking for a relationship. She wanted to have fun and Tom was funny! They had a lot in common, from a love of sad British music like The Smiths to obscure movies and more. However, Tom took this mutual interest and chemistry as signs of compatibility, ignoring Summer’s clear message that she was not interested in continuing a relationship with him. In other words, he didn’t want to believe what she said and assigned alternative meanings to her words. That maybe she just needed time to let down her walls and let him in.
3. Your expectations will break your heart more than anything else.
One of the greatest and most beautifully filmed moments is the side-by-side portrayal of the discrepancy that often appears between our expectations and reality.
Summer and Tom had been separated for some time, but they ran into each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. The two bonded, danced and drank together. It seemed (almost) as if the situation had not changed much. Definitely not, at least in Tom’s case.
Some time in the future, Summer invites Tom to her apartment for a party. As the narrator states: “Tomek went to her apartment, intoxicated by the promise of the evening. He believed that this time his expectations would match reality”
Every shot in this segment shows that this was not the case at all. In fact, Tom runs out of the party when he sees that Summer has an engagement ring on her finger. She fell in love with someone else.
4. Love won’t save you.
Tom grew up believing that he would never be truly happy until he found “The One,” which may be one of the reasons he put so much pressure on things to work out with Summer. At one point, he even admits that his feelings for Summer make him feel like life is worth living.
The truth is that love won’t save you. But that doesn’t mean you have to be completely healed to find it. But at least you have to try to connect yourself and life before you share it with someone else.
5. Healing from a broken heart takes time.
Sometimes a plot time. This process is not linear either. In fact, 500 days of summer it is even filmed to illustrate this. The film jumps from different points in time to show a juxtaposition of the moment when Tom was in love with Summer, healing from Summer, and ultimately leaving Summer.
6. Illusions will always fall apart eventually.
Throughout the non-linear film, we see flashbacks from Tom’s perspective about his affair with Summer. At first, everything in his imagination seems romantic and promising. However, at the end of the film, when Tom’s younger sister encourages him to look back on his romance with Summer through a more realistic lens, the rose-colored glasses come off and we see the full picture: Summer wasn’t interested in him in the same way he was into her. And there were plenty of signs to prove it.
7. You have to love someone for who they really are (not who you are). think They are).
Probably the biggest takeaway 500 days of summer there is a danger of falling in love with the idea of someone rather than who that person actually is. Tom put Summer on a pedestal, missing her hopelessly because he felt there would never be anyone else he could love the way he loved her. And he may be right, but only because he constructed who he thought she was without including who she actually was. Sure, the summer he dreamed up might be his dream girl, but you have to wake up from your dreams, right? As Paul Tomka says about his partner Robyn:
“Robyn is better than the girl of my dreams. She is real. travel blog