We Are Too Obsessed with Endings

Tommy Butler wrote in Catching Leaves:

“We are too obsessed with endings. There are so many great lives and beautiful loves in this world to witness and experience, yet the moment an ending is less than ideal, we immediately call it a tragedy. Or conversely, if there is a single moment of redemption at the end, a lifetime of injustice and suffering can be dismissed.”

The first time I read this, I paused. I kept thinking about the phrase “too obsessed with endings” and realized something: we don’t judge a relationship, an experience, or even a life by how alive it once felt — only by how it ended.

But if parting is inevitable, what is the meaning of meeting?

Ten minutes after sunset, blue spreads across the sky. Layers of cobalt and indigo quietly unfold. This brief moment is called the “blue hour.” It doesn’t linger. It waits for no one. Yet people still stand still, lift their cameras, hold their breath, and watch it appear.

Why are we so drawn to the blue hour? Perhaps because we know it won’t last. And because it’s fleeting, we look harder. No one can resist a romance that is brief and absolute.

Recently, I revisited One Day and La La Land. The first time I watched them, I didn’t understand what Emma meant by loving someone but not liking them. I thought it was avoidance — even cowardice. But now, after living a little more, I finally understand.

Loving someone doesn’t mean you’re meant to live with them forever. Love is an emotion. Living together is a structure.

“You think the worst thing in life is losing the person you love most. In truth, the worst thing is losing yourself because you loved someone too much.”

Emma and Dexter spent twenty years finding their way back to each other. She finally met him at his most mature, most ready — and died in the very year he loved her most. Fate didn’t give them forever. It gave them a moment.

Dexter unraveled. He drank, spiraled, and only through loss did he learn gratitude. Through regret, he slowly grew up. When his father told him, “Live as if Emma were still by your side,” he began to live again.

That’s when I understood: maybe the meaning of meeting isn’t to possess someone forever, but to be changed by them.

I remember crying at “I’m always gonna love you” when I first watched La La Land. How could two people love each other so deeply and still not end up together? I still cry at the ending.

But now, I also feel grateful for their choice.

They didn’t sacrifice themselves to preserve love. They didn’t shrink their dreams to keep each other. In the years apart, they worked, grew, and became who they wanted to be. When they met again in that bar, they danced through a silent “what if,” then smiled, nodded, and let go.

Without each other, they still built the lives they once dreamed of.

So if parting is inevitable, what is the meaning of meeting? These films offered me the most beautiful answer I have ever heard:

“The part of me you changed will stay with me in your place.”

In Harry Potter, George loses Fred, yet he continues along the path of his life. But Fred’s courage, humor, habits, preferences, and laughter remain — walking beside George as he moves forward.

People come and go. Regret is more common than reunion. In real life, missing someone often means losing them for good. But if we truly cherished those days — if we were happy — then that shining stretch of time is still worth remembering.

Learning to say goodbye is a lesson life repeats.

“Some goodbyes are not meant to end things, but to allow us to move forward carrying a love we fully understand.”

And every ending that leaves regret behind must have once held something deeply beautiful.

Whether it’s fate or simply the way things are, I accept it.

I will still miss those who didn’t stay. I will still cry over what was lost. But I won’t let the ending erase the beauty of what came before.

I will always be in love with the romantic, fleeting, vanishing「 Blue Hour.」