yulinisworking:

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a project that’s taken me on what I have affectionately dubbed a gay marriage tour of America. Really pleased to share the results of those efforts in this new video today, which combines my love of Shakespeare with my love of love.

Some of you who’ve been following my work may recognize the concept from an earlier episode of I Didn’t Write This featuring Sonnet 116. It’s one of my very favorite poems, and I’ve always felt it related particularly well to the subject of marriage equality. I don’t write literary analysis papers anymore, but this was just as fun to make (and required about the same amount of all-nighters!). For the record, I love writing literary analysis papers.

There’s a lot of focus within proper documentaries on what did we learn here? Because this video was more a celebration of love and literature than a documentary, I didn’t spend too much time exploring that in the video itself. But for the sake of this tumblr post, I can tell you what I learned.

I asked every couple we visited the same handful of questions –

– How did you first meet?
– Tell me about your first kiss.
– Do you believe in love at first sight?
– How did you know this was the right person for you, forever?
– What’s your favorite thing about your partner?
– What advice would you give to other couples who want a lasting, healthy relationship?

The specific love stories attached to each couple were wildly diverse, ranging from angrily rejected first proposals that consisted of “Well, we can get married if you want to…” to high school friends who reconnected years later after coming out, to your classic boy meets boy at a bar on a night when he didn’t want to go out at all. But after the specifics fell aside, I started to hear the same things over and over: 

We don’t believe in love at first sight. It’s hard to know that this is the right person for you, forever – the main factor is time. It takes time to see how you weather the arguments, the hard times, the tiny daily annoyances.

Communication and humor and patience are the most important things for a lasting, healthy relationship. 

The couples I met confirmed something that I’ve long felt to be true – that the sweeping, epic love stories you see in movies aren’t the full story, that true love arrives during the tiny mundane moments between the movie moments of your life. It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. I heard stories of break ups and reconnections, long distance and uncertainty. Some of these love stories came with complications – broken hearts and responsibilities tied to past decisions. What they all had in common was that they weathered these storms and grew together.

I don’t believe in soul mates being born; I believe in people who fall in love slowly and become each other’s soul mates through time spent together, growing up and growing wiser. 

Anyway. That’s what I learned. I wish there was room to put that all into this video as well, but hey, that’s what tumblr essays are for! Particular thanks goes to all the couples featured in this video, especially the seven couples who I had the privilege of meeting in person. They exist in real life, which I think makes their love stories particularly extraordinary and epic and grand. 

Also shoutout to YouTube’s Field Day Initiative, which gave me the opportunity to take on this project. Check out other videos on their channel here.

Much love,

Yulin Kuang
http://youtube.com/yulinisworking

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1MrjSah.