A student of Plato’s once said, “Every craft and every line of inquiry, and likewise every action and decision, seems to seek some good; that is why some people were right to describe the good as what everything seeks.” By this Aristotle made the astute observation that people always seek things that they think are good, at least temporarily good. It is an important observation because people seek a diversity of “goods” and yet there is unity in the fact that they each believe what they are seeking to be a good of some sort.
In He’s Just Not That Into You each of the main characters is pursuing a kind of love that they believe to be good. Not only do they believe it to be good but the kind of good most of them are seeking is wholeness, which is what Aristophanes says we seek. However, Scarlett Johanssen’s character is ultimately the only one pursuing relationships under the delusion that there is one person who will fully satisfy her and that she must find and bond herself to that person. The other eight main characters have varying ideas of love and the good that it can bring them but I would like to focus on the narrator, Gigi.
Gigi pursues relationship after relationship because she desperately wants to find someone who will be her “One.” Her thoughts do not remain in that desperate pursuit, however. She experiences change in her understanding of love that moves her from seeking this “One.” So, though Scarlett Johanssen’s character believes it to be true, for He’s Just the Soul Mate Pursuit is not the ultimate activity of love. In fact, the kind of love found at the end of He’s Just is personal wholeness, love of self, essentially the harmony of Eryximachus.
In Plato’s Symposium, Eryximachus, a doctor, gives a speech on how Love brings us harmony, and that is why it is good and pursued. Human beings seek harmony because the lack thereof is our halve-ness. Harmony is wholeness. Eryximachus does not say that love is only harmony, however. He takes from Pausanias’s speech before him. Pausanias divides love into two categories, Heavenly and Vulgar. Eryximachus takes the division and pronounces scientific causes upon them as the differentiating factor. He says there is a love manifested in health and a love manifested in disease, and that the presence or absence of harmony is the essential difference. The love manifested in health is noble, moderate, and proper. Whereas, the love manifested in disease is impulsive, disgraceful, and improper.
Gigi’s desperate love for any man who looks at her would be diagnosed as a love manifested in disease. It is enormously impulsive and immoderate. She throws herself on top of Alex, waits for hours and hours by the phone for a call from a man she just met, and she treats every relationship as if they are married shortly after they’ve been dating. She wants wholeness so much and relationships are a way of self-medicating the disharmony in her being. However, her desperation and disease of disharmony are then what cause her relationships to fizzle and implode.
As the film develops though, Gigi learns to see the good things about herself and correct the inordinate aspects of her life and beliefs. She develops self-respect, personal wholeness, harmony, and that is what then empowers her to have love manifested in health. This love is what allows her to have a moderate and proper relationship at the conclusion of the film.
In her closing narration Gigi says, “… maybe a happy ending doesn't include a guy, maybe... it's you, on your own, picking up the pieces and starting over, freeing yourself up for something better in the future. Maybe the happy ending is... just... moving on.” So the “happy ending” the ultimate goal of love is not necessarily finding your other half, or having the romance of your life. Instead it is in gaining balance in your being. This wholeness of self, this harmony, is exactly what Eryximachus says love does for us, and it is the ultimate conclusion of He’s Just Not That Into You. What is interesting about this is that it tells us something about what love does for people, the effects of it, but it does not say much about what love actually is and what we actually do with it. That is where this idea of love leaves us. There’s no prescription for harmony in affections or soul or mind and though we know more about the ultimate effects of it, we still do not know what love is.
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