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
Comment
Migration
Politics
Romance
5 min read

Families like mine are impossible now, thanks to the idol that is the net migration target

Politician priests are making pointless sacrifices on the altar of numbers

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A Border Force officer wears body armour with Immigration Enforcement written on the back
UK Border Force.

Let me tell you a love story. Eighteen years ago, in a time before politicians had taken to immolating their values on the altar of the semiannual net migration totals, I fell for the pretty Scottish bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding. The romance presented some challenges for an American like me, but none that were insurmountable. She found a year-long internship near me in Seattle and, just before she returned home, I popped the question.  

The process of applying for a UK visa was just another bit of the tedious logistics of an overseas move, the kind of thing a romantic comedy skips over with a ‘One Year Later’ movie subtitle so that it can end with a joyous wedding ceilidh in a picturesque Scottish locale. Our first few years together in Edinburgh were lean ones. Having takeaway coffee more than once a week felt like a scandalously indulgent luxury. Even so, I was able to progress seamlessly from my marriage visa to indefinite leave to remain, to citizenship.   

None of this would be possible if we were young twentysomethings in love today. We would fail every test of what the Home Office now considers to be acceptable romance.  

During our first year of marriage, the stipend my wife received while training for ministry would have been well short of the £18,600 income threshold introduced in 2012 for a sponsoring spouse, let alone the £29,000 required now. While we did have some savings, they were nowhere near the £88,500 now needed to waive the income requirement, and, in any case, would have been substantially drained by the £5,000 in fees and health surcharges that a two-and-half-year spouse visa now costs. It is little wonder Brits who have found love abroad, even ones in a substantially better financial and professional position than we were then, are now finding it impossible to move back to the UK.  

What is the cause of these new barriers? A hint can be found in the title of a recent Guardian article about recommendations for a slight relaxation of the income threshold to between £23,000 to £25,000. ‘Lowering UK’s income requirement for family visas ‘would increase net migration’, the piece was headlined. When even the most left wing major daily in Britain can’t report on the possibility of things being marginally easier for Brits who have the temerity to love a non-citizen, without framing it in terms of net migration, it’s a sign that we have all fallen captive to this singular statistic.  

Net migration is a number created by humans and yet it has come to play the role of an angry god which demands sacrifices every time it is reported. The right of working class people to marry a non-citizen spouse, the economic viability of our universities, and the proper staffing of the NHS are all victims its politician-priests have offered up in hopes that they would satiate its hunger. Net zero maybe next. 

There is no particular reason to think totting up the total number of people who arrived in the UK with the intention of staying here for a year and then subtracting the total number who left with the intention of staying abroad for a similar duration is a particularly meaningful exercise. It conflates people like me, who came here with every intention to settle and start a family, with students coming for a one-year master’s, doctors filling vital roles in NHS with children try to stay with with a migrant parent and Afghan refugees seeking long-term sanctuary with oil workers serving time in Aberdeen before moving on to Calgary or Brunei.  

The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments. 

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to think carefully about how much of each form of migration to allow, but when they are all grouped together under this single measure a peculiar logic sets in. Want to do the right thing by welcoming refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong? Well, then, we’ll have to offset that with restricting visas for overseas students and throwing our higher education sector into chaos. Need more highly skilled programmers working in banks in London? Well, maybe we can balance that by demanding care workers abandon their kids if they want to look after someone in Nottingham. There is no reason to weigh the needs of these different sectors against each other, and yet the logic of this statistic demands that we do. 

The Bible has a word for human-made things which take on their own singular, violent logic. It calls them idols. While that word may conjure images of golden calves, the accusation which biblical writers consistently make against idolaters, that their idols blind them to what is really important and numbs their critical thinking, applies equally well when the idol is a statistic. The dominance of this statistic in our discourse has warped our moral discernments. It has made us unable to say what should be said without glancing nervously at its imposing shadow. It causes us to say things that should never be said and not notice how absurd they are. 

Instead, we should be able to celebrate that hundreds of thousands of people want to come to study at our universities (the vast majority of whom return home after finishing their studies)  and, hopefully, someday also be able to celebrate when hundreds of thousands of refugees are able to return to a peaceful and liberated Ukraine without having to calculate that the former will raise and the latter lower our totals. We should be able to welcome easing of income restrictions on spouse visas without noting that it will lead to a marginal increase in net migration. We should be able to see that sending an eight- and eleven-year-old back to Brazil without their parents is not, in the words of a Home Office official, “a degree of disruption in family life” which is “proportionate to the legitimate aim of maintaining effective immigration control”, but rather a gross violation of human decency. 

Migrants are not just numbers on a balance sheet. The diversity of our lives, what we give to the UK, what we receive in return, cannot be summed up in a single annual figure. And yet every six months, as the figure comes out, politicians express disappointment and announce measures to put that little bit of extra pressure on us, so that maybe a few more of us who can leave will. In the process they are sacrificing to this idol not just the peace of mind and the economic well-being of many migrants, but also much of the vitality of the nation as a whole. The Bible has a solution for idols. They are only fit to be melted down, destroyed, and forgotten. It is time to consider giving this one a similar treatment. 

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