It might be the insomnia, but Ryan Reynolds is a terrific actor.  I just finished watching the movie Chaos Theory (2007), and I believe it has sneaked onto my top 5 list.

The Departed, Gladiator, and Inception still take the cake of course, but this is a different category of art altogether.  It doesn’t betray your expectations with twists like a Scorsese flick and it doesn’t blow your mind like Inception.  It’s more subtle:  It takes you by the hand and walks you through this plethora of emotions you never knew you had, then it sits you down, looks you in the eye, and speaks truth.  I’ll be honest, from the guy who did Van Wilder and Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, I was not expecting this.

Enough about the guy who plays the Green Lantern, though.  I am more interested in this  movie’s message.  At the end of the film, an older Ryan Reynolds says this to his future son-in-law:

It turns out that there are few things more chaotic than the beat of a human heart… It’s always changing depending on what’s happening out there.  It’s an erratic son of a bitch. But underneath all of that bump-da-bump mess, there is a pattern – the truth – and it’s love.  The most important thing about love is that we choose to give it, and we choose to receive it…making it the least random act in the entire universe.  It transcends blood; it transcends betrayal and all the dirt that makes us human.

This was about the point I started crying, but that’s beside the point.  I keep running into this notion that love is a deliberate choice.  That it’s not something you “fall” into, but rather consciously stride into.  Donald Miller talks about how even though marriage is a commitment to love unconditionally, the love for a spouse – or at least that commitment – is inherently conditional.

Ryan Reynolds’ character says that love is something you choose to give because his situation demanded that choice.  His whole reality turned out to be other than what he thought, and he had to reconcile the truth with the love he had for his wife and daughter.  Things happened that gave him every reason to stop loving, and it was at that moment of choice that he discovered exactly what love is.  Classic stories teach us to doubt love if it’s not “at first sight,” but I am starting to think love that is deliberate has a lot more to offer.

I don’t know.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.

What is romantic love to you?  Is it conditional or unconditional?  Something that happens to you or something you decide?