Lessons ‘Someone Great’ Taught Us About Friendship, Self-Love, And Letting Go
SPOILER ALERT:
This article contains spoilers for the 2019 Netflix movie Someone Great.
Someone can be a wonderful person and still not the right person for you.
Nate and Jenny dated for nine years before Nate breaks up with Jenny around a week before her move to San Francisco from New York City. Jenny is moving because she landed a job at Rolling Stone as a music journalist.
Jenny, during the breakup conversation with Nate, claims the move is the reason for their demise but Nate reminds her that it’s because their relationship isn’t working, and hasn’t been working, long before she got the job offer and made plans to move across the country.
He is gentle and clearly heartbroken himself as he cuts things off. Nate still loves her and Jenny still loves him, but ultimately their paths are no longer aligned. They are both wonderful people but aren’t ultimately aren’t right for one another.
Your real friends will always have your back (even if you don’t agree all the time).
Throughout Someone Great, you see how different Jenny, Erin, and Blair are. They have their disagreements, but they always stick by each other’s sides, even when it’s hard. This shows that your real friends will always have your back. They get you, even if they don’t move through life the same way as you. They understand you and look out for you. And they’ll get you through a world-shattering breakup by dancing with you to Lizzo in the kitchen. Mimosas are optional but encouraged.
Sometimes, you need to choose yourself (even when it hurts).
The day after their breakup, Jenny sees Nate at Neon Classic, a music festival at Sony Hall they had planned to go to together but, due to the previous night’s events, they decided to attend separately.
Jenny wants to talk to him but is met with a ton of pushback from Erin and Blair, who are trying to protect her from making a mistake and getting even more hurt. She eventually ditches her friends to go to the bathroom to text him but drunkenly drops her phone in the toilet, rendering it totally unusable.
She leaves the restroom and goes back to the dance floor, where she is unable to find Erin and Blair. Instead, she catches Nate’s eyes. She mouths, “I love you” to him to which he mouths back, “Forever.”
*Cue sobbing*
While this would have been a perfect opportunity to walk over and talk with him, Jenny instead leaves. Later, as Jenny sits with Erin and Blair telling them what happened, she discusses her choice to walk away. She says in that moment, even though it made her so sad, she was choosing herself. And sometimes, that’s the only thing you can do to move on.
Just because a relationship falls apart doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.
In fact, this might make it matter more.
After Jenny leaves Neon Classic, she cries on the subway while writing in her notebook about the end of her relationship with Nate. She acknowledges how they were broken beyond repair. But within the cracks of her heartbreak, she is able to see light. The memories. All the good that once was. She can see how beautiful they were and how at that moment in time, they always will be.
In her journal, she writes:
“Unfortunately, sometimes things don’t break, they shatter. But when you let the light in, shattered glass will glitter. And in those moments when the pieces of what we were catch the sun, I’ll remember just how beautiful it was. Just how beautiful it’ll always be. Because it was us. And we were magic. Forever.”