I Love You, Even if I Don't Always Understand You

I watched Regretting You with my family the other day, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Yes, the script was cringey and some things felt more rushed than others, but the meaning and the story behind it were much more beautiful than people are giving credit for. 

Regretting You reminded me that you don’t have to understand someone to love them. Sometimes love is messy, wordless, and even good intentions can sound like slammed doors. Clara and Morgan—daughter and mother—keep missing each other's meaning, even though the love never really disappears. 

Their grief turned their love sharp-edged, mirroring real life. Clara’s anger and Morgan’s silence reflect reality: how the people who love us can still hurt us, how growing up changes the way we see our parents, and how forgiveness can be quieter than a simple “I’m sorry.” 

When Morgan tried to protect Clara, it looked like control. When Clara tried to be honest, it looked like rebellion. Maybe that’s what happens when two people are hurting—their love gets lost in translation. Morgan and Clara are real—they were written for more than just to drive the plot. 

Something that really makes this film stand apart from others is that it didn’t romanticize the idea of love magically fixing everything. It showed that healing looks different for everybody. It showed healing requires honesty, and sometimes honesty only shows up when everything starts to fall apart. And when two people are hurting, especially a mother and daughter, their truths start to sound like two versions of the same sentence. I was reminded that sometimes, mothers and daughters speak the same language with different definitions. 

Morgan wasn’t the villain of the story, and Clara wasn’t an emotional teenager. They just didn’t fully understand each other or what they were going through, even though they were experiencing it together.

Seeing Morgan and Clara on my screen made me think of all the times I’ve misunderstood my own mother. How easy it is to assume her silence means she doesn’t care, when she might really just be trying to hold it all together. How sometimes her anger comes from fear rather than hatred. It also made me think that two people can love each other so fully and so deeply, and still get everything wrong. This film really held up a mirror to how miscommunication taints relationships long before we even realize it’s happening. 

I think it also proves how love isn’t always sure. Sometimes it’s confusing. Sometimes it’s ignoring your mom before school because she made you angry, but still making her tea exactly how she likes it. You don’t always understand why you do what you do, but you know where it comes from, and you know that it’s from love. 

Walking out of the theatre, I realized the story had done something rare—it made me reflect on my own life. Movies rarely make me do that. It opened my eyes and made me realize my parents actually don’t have it all together. They’re figuring it out, just like I am, and there isn’t a Parents Manual there to help them. 

Moms and Dads are people just like we are, and children don’t often understand that. We all hold our parents on such high, glittering pedestals, that when we finally learn who they really are, they come crashing down. 

I think that’s part of growing up—realizing that the people who have raised you are still learning, too. They’re still figuring it out, still hurting, still making mistakes they don’t understand. It can be almost jarring to see your parents as people rather than seeing them as superheroes, but it’s also incredibly freeing. It makes room for compassion and patience, for the kind of understanding that isn’t possible when you are always expecting perfection from them. 

When Clara started viewing her mom as a person with dreams and feelings, it also opened up an entire gate for forgiveness. Clara’s forgiveness to her mom wasn’t easy, but it did teach me one thing.

Forgiveness is not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes, it can be choosing to soften. Choosing to see effort rather than mistakes. It’s choosing to listen, even when you don’t understand. That’s what Morgan and Clara do. Their love and forgiveness weren’t perfect. It was hard, and it was a tall ladder to climb. But they tried, and they never gave up, and despite all the trouble and heartache that came with it, they stayed true to each other. I think that’s the real way to heal. It isn’t by fixing everything at once, but by taking one small step towards each other at a time.

What Regretting You gets right, is that love is not easy by any means. It’s trying, even when you don’t know the right words. It’s staying, even when you’re scared. Love is showing up, even when you’ve hurt one another. 

I think that’s why this movie has stayed with me. It reminded me love doesn’t have to be perfect—it just has to be real. It can be messy and flawed, stretching and aching without breaking. It allows room for mistakes but also for understanding. I think that in a world that tells us love should look flawless, Regretting You, tells us the messy kind counts too. 

From my window seat to yours,

Chiara