Review
Culture
Film & TV
Romance
6 min read

What’s love got to do with it?

Watching Lovesick, a surprisingly profound comedy about chlamydia, prompts Beatrice Scudeler to consider permanence in relationships.

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here

A row of young people stand and talk to each other
Lovesick's cast.
Netflix.

This article contains spoilers for those who have not seen Lovesick

I was working on my English MA in 2019, just before the start of the pandemic, when a friend first told me about a Netflix show that had just aired its final season, Lovesick. The premise, I will grant, was not the most inspiring one for an unmarried, socially conservative graduate student whose only experience of dating had been an unfortunate three-day courtship with her at-the-time best male university friend.  

In Lovesick, Dylan Witter is the usual twenty-something-year-old: out of university, sort of purposeless, dating a string of women he thinks he’s deeply in love with, but breaking up with each of them no later than at the four-month mark. Unsurprisingly, he is diagnosed with chlamydia; shaken by the realisation that eleven years of sex out of marriage has left him with little more than sadness and a disease, he decides to meet with all of his ex-girlfriends, both to warn them that he may have given them chlamydia, but most importantly to try and figure out why he can’t find permanence in his relationships.  

From this point, Lovesick spends three seasons going back and forth between Dylan’s past and his present, building towards the final confrontation, at the end of season three, with his best friend Evie, with whom, he eventually realises, he has been in love for seven years. Along the way, we meet Dylan and Evie’s other best friend, Luke, who proposed to his girlfriend while still at university, was rejected, and now lives a sexually reckless lifestyle, as well as Angus, the kind-of-forgotten friend, who married a woman he didn’t really love, had sex with a maths student turned one-time stripper, divorced his wife Helen, and is now having a child with ex-stripper Holly. 

By the time we are out of university or school, it is unsurprising that our sense of certainty and purpose should crumble, when suddenly the burden of finding meaning is solely on our shoulders. 

Based on this description alone, you’d be forgiven if you thought this show quite a depressing drama, and certainly not one worth your time. In fact, it is a surprisingly profound, honest comedy about our generation’s struggle with the false promise of freedom, and our deep-seated desire for permanence, for a more sacramental view of reality. Dylan’s trials in his youth all point him towards the realisation that making commitments (whether that’s sticking to a career and becoming actually good at your job or finding permanence in a romantic relationship) is ultimately the one thing that makes life worth living. The writers of Lovesick would perhaps not put it this way, but this truly is a show about people who desperately need God, and fail without His guidance.  

The same applies to all of us, to those who are not Christians, but also to those of us who profess Christianity, but live as though we are atomised and self-sufficient (which we can all be tempted to do). When we are children, we have our parents to guide us; they are not a replacement for God, but they provide some guidance. Later, at school and university, it’s our teachers. By the time we are out of university or school, it is unsurprising that our sense of certainty and purpose should crumble, when suddenly the burden of finding meaning is solely on our shoulders.  

If we go to church, if we have a community in Christ to support us, the burden is somewhat lifted. But Dylan, Evie, Luke, and Angus have no such thing. They rely on each other alone, and, since they are lost, all they can do is commiserate each other about how difficult adult life is.  

Even so, the suggestion is there in Lovesick that there are moral standards external to our conscience, that there is something sacred and greater than us. In the very first episode of the show, Angus begins his ill-fated marriage to Helen. They get married in what is presumably an Anglican church, and Dylan makes a curious remark that, even though he’s ‘not religious’, a wedding in a church seems more appropriate. He laughs it off by suggesting that you have to sit somewhere hard and cold to really enjoy the ceremony, but it’s clear that he’s talking about more than this.  

What he’s experiencing is an intuition which I would guess is still in so many of us even in our post-Christian society, that is, the intuition that there is something sacred about promising to love and care for another person for the rest of your life, that it’s not merely a contract. It is a duty to uphold such a promise, and this is a kind of promise that ties us in love to what some people may call ‘the universe’, though what we really mean, who we really mean, is Christ.  

They have chosen to make an attempt at permanence, not to dismiss adult life as a senseless heap of broken people.

Sure enough, the rest of the show is about our protagonists watching all their significant relationships fall apart, and trying to rebuild them. I will have to spoil the ending for you, but that does not really matter, as it’s fairly obvious which direction the show is building towards from the very first episode. Angus is left alone as Holly leaves him, but vows to find a new job in order to provide for his unborn child. Luke stops engaging in promiscuous behaviour (sort of, he has seven years of trauma to deal with, after all) and begins a precarious, but genuinely caring relationship. After being hurt and hurting many people, Dylan and Evie decide that, in spite of all the heartbreak, and after a broken engagement, it is still valuable to make ourselves vulnerable to suffering for the sake of loving another person.  

The show ends with Dylan telling Evie that he loves her for the first time, and you can tell it’s the first time in his life that he has really meant it. They are not married yet, but we can guess that’s what will happen next. They have chosen to make an attempt at permanence, not to dismiss adult life as a senseless heap of broken people, but rather to decide to take away some of the brokenness by growing up, making a commitment, and standing firm.  

To marry during a pandemic, in the wake of my parents’ divorce, and uncertain about our future, was at once the maddest, and the best decision we ever made. 

 

Something I have not yet told you is that the first time I watched this show was when I first started dating my husband. Although I could not relate to the endless dating, I could relate to the fear, the uncertainty of whether the other person wants to care for you in the way we want to care for them.  

Not long after, I told my now husband that, if he didn’t think our relationship would lead to marriage, I’d much rather we break up and move on. I did not want Dylan and Evie’s seven years of suffering. I wanted marriage, I wanted commitment, I wanted a family. We did get married, around a year later, and after a year of marriage I watched Lovesick again. Now as a married woman, and having gone through the hardships of moving country twice, having a child after a difficult delivery, and facing problems in our extended family, I appreciated more deeply what a sacred and courageous thing it is to commit to sticking by one person, no matter what.  

To marry and have children, knowing how ruthless and un-beauteous the world can be, is exactly the act of bravery our society so desperately needs. I watched Lovesick for the third time just recently, leading up to our second wedding anniversary. It was my husband’s first time watching, and we could not help but reminisce about our courtship, and how, to marry during a pandemic, in the wake of my parents’ divorce, and uncertain about our future, was at once the maddest, and the best decision we ever made 

So, yes, watch Lovesick, even though it’s technically just a comedy about chlamydia. It may spur you to reflect on the real meaning of love: the fearless and unconditional caring for the other, regardless of their brokenness, but rather because of it. After all, that is how God loves us

Article
America
Conspiracy theory
Culture
Politics
5 min read

US election: the primal stories trumping facts

Projections and polls cannot capture the power of stories shaping identity.

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

a map depicts US states coloured red and blue.
538 election prediction map.
ABC News.

Washington D.C. — Election throes in America are intensifying while citizens prepare to cast their votes. The last week alone has been something like a whirlwind, not to mention the entire campaign itself. 

Last week, Americans tuned into the first and possibly final Presidential debate between Trump and Harris. On the heels of the debate came a flurry of propaganda leveled by JD Vance (and promoted by Trump) against Haitian migrant communities in Ohio. These claims resulted in bomb threats and school closures. 

And to wrap up the week, a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in nearly as many months. Trump and his campaign, quicker and more direct that the first attempt, quickly cast the blame towards Democrats, specifically for what they see as violent rhetoric in describing Trump as a “threat to democracy.” Trump meanwhile continues to campaign on threats and claims of election fraud, refusing to signal he’d accept the certified results of the election in the event he loses.  

That’s just another week in an unpredictable American presidential election. 

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle. 

And life goes on. For now, in this time, in my small corner of American life, I find there is this mixture of exhausted apathy and existential rage. In view of the spectacle, there’s a general exasperation of “what will happen next?” But more personally, dispersed on social media, is the existential zeal and dread—“we” have to defeat “them!”   

The danger of this mixture is twofold. Just as odd as it is potent. It is also combustible. And just as it can lay dormant; it can also be summoned by a mere spark.  

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle with predictions and projections. Some offer prayer. 

I listen in on conservative Christian talk radio. Prayers offered on air for God to intervene. What follows is a litany of slogans— “secure our borders” and “defend life” and “the economy” — and of course prayers for the salvation of those who think differently.  

Then, there’s more daring outrage merchants with deep pockets. Those who try to shift the election through nefarious means. Like the case of Tenet Media, a media network of right-wing American podcasters who were recently indicted by the Justice Department for receiving Russian funds through fronted companies.  

It seems to me that the heart of the matter in the midst of this election, deeper than policy and beyond the spectacle, is that none of us are entirely sure what reality another person inhabits.  

A new study published last week found that most registered Republicans (at 67 per cent) trust the Trump campaign as their primary source for election information. Trump’s word, for nearly three quarters of his party, is given more authority than government certification, media-based news, or local news. 

This raises the possibility that, in 50-some-odd days, if Trump refuses to concede, if he repeats claims of election fraud, his base seems ready and willing to believe it.  

Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning.

Alongside the debates about policy, the propaganda that stokes division and dehumanizes migrant communities, is a deeper crisis of source authority. Of not just “facts” but truth, of meaning, of reality. 

The study revealed that most Americans signal they tend to trust information that comes from “data” and “facts.” But oddly enough, nothing about that statement seems to accord with the on the ground reality of America’s social fabric.  

We should know by now: facts have never been enough.  

100 years ago, as novelist Rebecca West reflected on the chaotic series of events that sparked World War I, she admitted, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many.” 

 What seems “real” for many Americans is not (and perhaps has never been) rooted entirely in the all-powerful “fact.” Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning. These stories are primal. They’re the kind which create identities and bind communities. They are rich in meaning and so prove entirely immune to fact-checking operations. Source authority has no power apart from primal stories. And though projections and polls tend to focus on the data, they cannot capture the power of stories which create identity and contain community. This is the stuff the vote is made of, too. 

This past week, JD Vance defended his propaganda in the form of conspiracy theories of Haitian migrants eating pets by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”  

Ends-justifies-means has always been ascendant in politics. Nobody is arguing that MAGA invented political expediency. But this election is careening towards deep waters which we would do well to avoid. 

“Propaganda is a means to an end,” said Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1934 before an audience at Nuremberg, “…it provides the background music...[it] miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people.” 

I do not know what the next 50 days will hold. I remain deeply concerned that the word of Trump aspires to assume an authority which sees democracy as a meddling imposition in one man’s destiny. But I do know that none of this is fated. As Augustine observed during the throes of Rome’s collapse: “Bad times! Hard times!” this is what they are saying. But let us live well and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times. 

May it be so.