From the age of twelve I dreamed of chance encounters with De Ware. Because I could run into Him anywhere, I was always on the alert, especially when I was traveling alone and had hours to spend in an airport, and no, in my forties I don’t understand how my parents allowed me to fly alone to friends across the border at such a young age. other side of the world, you did get some kind of guidance, but then again: what kind of times were those! Considering all the 1990s movies about love at first sight on the road, I can’t have been the only one fantasizing about it. Think of Before Sunrisefeaturing Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who met on the train and fell madly in love before dawn.
Because of that long gone longing for the feeling that everything and everyone, just like that, out of the blue, has the potential to change your life forever for the better, I wanted to Everything I Know About Love to see. Because that’s what the series poster sells: Maggie (Emma Appleton) and Street (Connor Finch) are on the platform, in front of a train, and you know: she’s on her way, he’s on her way, and boom! Love, or something like it.
It is no coincidence that I start watching the day after I’ve been to a festival, because as an adult you have to schedule days to be useless, and the kids are at a camp. The series opens with the meeting between Maggie and Street. It is England, 2012. She sits in the compartment opposite him and orders two wines and a whiskey, her balance is insufficient, and he, lifesaver, pays. They say goodbye in London. With a passionate kiss. She doesn’t want his number because she believes in fate: if they meet again, she says, it was meant to be. Otherwise not.
After which Maggie and her friends – a seut, a girl of color and one with a boring boyfriend – do nothing in Camden but dress up for a drink. A little later, the inevitable happens: Maggie and Street run into each other. He doesn’t even recognize her – okay then. However, he turns out to be a know-it-all slippery. Literal. His face is so… smooth? His skin has no pores, his hair is full of gel, and the fact that I’m so distracted by everything that’s wrong with his appearance when he’s objectively handsome means only one thing: I don’t like him. I don’t feel anything for him, except yikes, and Jesus, take off that stupid alternate hat!
Unfortunately, I also have very little sympathy for the main character Maggie. How she dances through the living room half-naked with her plump breasts and perfect body in a thong, cigarette nonchalantly in her mouth – fuck you. And what later do I have to empathize with how she struggled with complexes about her body as a teenager? Pfft. Don’t ask me why I sat through this series, I just always want to know how a story ends I’m afraid. If only I had never started it. No, my day couldn’t have ended more useless.
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