We are taught right from birth that love will reveal itself to us in different guises throughout our lives. In addition to familial love, platonic love for friends and romantic love for our partners, we’ll suffer the joys and pain of unrequited love and finding self-love. But the love that we’re not warned of, the sort that treads the tightrope of everlasting and never-quite-was, is the love we have for the ‘what ifs’. The people who, if fate had dealt us a different, more sympathetic hand, are the embodiment of the lives we might have lived.
‘What if’ people have become a mainstay in popular culture. Netflix snapped up the rights to David Nicholls’ 2009 bestseller, One Day, one of the most popular (and heartbreaking, if our Instagram feeds are anything to go by this week) fictional stories of a ‘what if’ pairing, after a three-and-a-half-year wait. In 2021, it finally commissioned the series, which stars The White Lotus star Leo Woodall as heartthrob Dexter Mayhew and This Is Going To Hurt’s Ambika Mod as the titular Emma Morley. One Day tells the will-they-won’t-they, decades-spanning love story of two friends who find that somehow life has a funny way of derailing their plans.
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Despite it having been less than a week since the series’ release, it has been ravenously devoured by audiences. While the streaming service has yet to release official viewing figures, the series’ delicate examination of the fragility of love and the poignancy of appreciating the present moment has clearly struck a chord. According to Google, searches for the 14-episode series have spiked by a far-from-humble 4,800% in the past seven days alone.
There is a scene in One Day, before Emma and Dexter share a tender conversation about the course that their lives are taking, in which Emma quotes Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in a speech. ‘That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life,’ she says, quoting the novel. ‘Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.’ In an increasingly tumultuous and tremulous world, and only a matter of years since we were confined to our homes in order to protect ourselves from a very real threat to life, the line between the 'what ifs' and 'have nots' has become increasingly blurred. The impact of the decision that you make today, the one that could inform the rest of your life, is more pronounced than ever before. We've lived through a period of life through which our very existences were changed in a matter of hours as we faced a decree to stay at home. Our collective trauma now serves as a mirror to what could have been and what might never be.
One Day is not the only release to have so closely examined the power of our ‘what if’ people. All Of Us Strangers and Past Lives, two recent critically acclaimed films, also tell the tender tales of the lost loves that pepper our lives. The former, starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, is loosely based on the 2004 English adaptation of Strangers, the psychological fiction novel by Japanese author Taichi Yamada originally published in 1987. It examines grief, loss, and love, and reinforces the little-acknowledged fact that we take a little of each other wherever we go.
Korean Canadian writer-director Celine Song’s tremendous debut feature film Past Lives follows a similar trajectory. It explores the Korean philosphy of ‘inyeon’. ‘There is a word in Korean – inyeon. It means providence or fate. But it’s specifically about relationships between people,’ the film’s protagonist Nora Lee, played by Greta Lee, explains. ‘It’s an inyeon if two strangers even walk past each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush, because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of inyeon over 8,000 lifetimes.’ Past Lives tackles what you would do if somebody from one of your former lives — childhood, adolescence, or young adulthood where you once existed on what felt like the cusp of everything — returned to your present-day life. Nora leaves her native South Korea for Canada at the age of 12, leaving behind her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung, played by Teo Yoo. Years later, Nora and Hae find each other at different points in their respective lives. Lives in which, they soon realise, the other is not a part of, despite once singlehandedly defining. Separated by fate and thousands of miles, Past Lives dances around the idea of somebody being a part of your destiny without ever becoming part of your final ensemble. Its tender portrayal of love debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last January and is in the running for two Oscar categories, including Best Picture and Original Screenplay.
These cultural projects assert that which the heartbroken often already know; that love will often strike like lightning at the right – which is to say the wrong – time, and whether you like it or not, it will stay with you for a lifetime. Whether we’ve lost love by design, intention, or accident, the tales of our ‘what if’ people transcend those of our more traditional love stories. These figures, which maybe we once loved or continue to love from afar, are often blank canvases upon which we can project our hopes, dreams, fantasies. Perhaps we once had them, nearly had them or never had them. Perhaps we have spent years merely imagining what it would be like to assign a space for them in our hearts, a space they could always call home. The mere fact ‘what if’ people exist in the world and have the ability to carve out a hole deep in the recesses of our hearts has the power to reassure. Their presence is a possibility that the ‘what if’ could, one day, become a ‘what about now’, or a ‘what do you say’, or a ‘what the hell, let’s just do it anyway.’
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Naomi May is a freelance writer and editor with an emphasis on popular culture, lifestyle and politics. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard as its Fashion and Beauty Writer, working across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Acting News Editor at ELLE UK and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others.
