My friend asked me to watch this movie because it stimulated a conversation

about different kinds of love. The movie is about a married woman who lives an ordinary life of details in an ordinary small Midwest town, but for four extraordinary days meets and falls deeply in love with another.

What of the husband she'd loved for 20 years? Was her love of each so different that there must be a different definition between "loving" someone and being "in love" with someone?

Harville Hendrix, who wrote 'Getting the Love You Want', says when we fall headlong in love with a soulmate, when the connection is immediate, powerful and spiritual, it is really a connection with ourselves more than the other.

We're triggered by a mythic invention inside us: our ideal lover, the perfect partner we've created in our unconscious. New lovers fall not in love with each other as much as what they symbolize to each other.

In the movie, the male character pretty much says it when he tells her every thing he's done to that moment has been to bring him to this place of meeting her. It's a terribly romantic idea... and it also reveals that the man is living a myth, a story he has created. Only time can refocus our image from myth to a sharper reality.

They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Well, it either does or it breeds accommodation. After a few years living with our ideal lover, how are we dealing with those habits we hadn't anticipated? Are we still in love? Has the nature of our love changed? I think it always does.

The woman character in the movie, played by Meryl Streep recognizes this. She tells him if she goes with him, as soon as they leave the farm house in Iowa, their love will change.

"For the better," Clint Eastwood says. "No" she says, her world of details will not disappear if they run away from it, but will haunt them.

Watching these characters

play out their inevitable tragedy got me thinking, not so much about falling in love, but falling out of it, and how it takes such a great deal of sad energy. If love is comfortable, safe, giving, completing, why ever give it up?

Even when one has 'an affair' and falls in love with another, to me it's a strange idea to leave the one you have.

Love, in its purest form, does not contract, does not steal love away from other pieces of one's heart like a trapped creature, chewing off its own foot to escape.

I hope to fall in love as often as I can. But I wish to never fall out of love again.