Love and Comfort

by Micho Matuszewski

Love is an extremely common tool in storytelling, if not a crucial one; when done well, its effect on the audience is almost always strong, even visceral. Love being as present in storytelling as it is makes sense: it is an extreme of emotion. There is very rarely a mild or mediocre sense of love. For good or ill, love elicits passion from the characters feeling its influence, and thusly the audience feels the impacts of said passions. It doesn’t have to be any particular type of love—regardless, strong feelings and stronger actions will follow in its path. Shared romantic love can lead to characters’ stories merging, unrequited love can lead to wallowing, platonic love can lead to solidarity, and so on. Like hate, love is an assertion, often an absolute, but the meaning of that assertion can change wildly chapter to chapter, not to mention book to book or show to show. Despite this variability, though, I believe there is at the very least one common theme which is necessary in an author’s employment of love, if it is to have the proper weight in the mind of the audience: comfort.

Comfort is a core desire shared by almost everyone who has ever lived. The longing for the comfort of a higher-paying job, the wish to return to a warm bed’s comforting embrace on an early morning, the simple comfort of not being alone on a long journey. The attempt at achieving greater comfort is about as human as you can get. While cultural or personal norms may shift what gives any particular individual a sense of comfort, humanity has long labored in search of a calmer, more fulfilling life, and as any desire it has often led to extreme action. The path towards comfort has led many a society to ruin, and yet we continue to seek it out, because we cannot help it. To me, this is why love is inherently bound up with comfort in storytelling. Where a character feels comfort is often a representation of how they feel love. Examples include: J.R.R. Tolkien’s hobbits’ life of comfort through simplicity being core to their collective love of the Shire; Avatar: The Last Air Bender’s Aang gaining a sense of comfort from the love of a small found family after losing all remnants of his former life; The Last of Us’ Bill only discovering a sense of love for the world and people now gone after feeling the comfort and security brought to him through his relationship with Frank. Comfort or its absence is a massive indicator of love and what is fundamentally important to the characters.

So, why is comfort so bound up in how love is written across various forms of media? Personally, I find it has a lot to do with what I mentioned before, about comfort and the never-ending quest for it being so core to the general human psyche. There’s a common thought that good storytelling involves characters that most people could see some aspect of themselves in. Horror is so visceral to us for this reason: because we see ourselves in the scared characters, and recognize our own mortality in their fictional deaths. I think it works the same way for love. We want to see ourselves in the love stories we experience, be they platonic, romantic, or otherwise. We want to share that feeling of love the character has, or lament with them about its loss. While we may not relate to a character’s particular expression of love, we can relate to the sudden warmth of enveloping comfort, or the cold sting of that comfort being torn away. We like to relate to each other, and what is more relatable than a sense of comfort?

Maybe all of this is just me, and as you’ve been reading this you’re thinking that this isn’t at all what love is about in storytelling—and, hey! You’re probably right. This is just what I’ve noticed in the way I’ve seen love expressed in media, and how I’ve related to it, and as if to round this whole thing out, there’s a strange sense of comfort for me in the thought that maybe you can relate to that too.