The first time I saw Call Me By Your Name, I was in the throes of fresh heartbreak. I remember sitting in the dark theatre, my eyes stinging as the romance onscreen blossomed, before fizzling out almost as quickly as it began. I was already so tender, and the film’s themes of young love and loss felt too close to my own reality. After all, fiction is only fiction when it is far enough away from your life that you can observe it rather than relive it.
There’s one scene, more than any other, that I find myself returning to. It comes near the end of the film: a monologue delivered by Elio’s father.
He says:
“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”
It has been eight years since the film’s release, and still, I return to that scene, to that line, like a reminder I can’t afford to lose.
The women in my family have always been mirrors, and inevitability, I became one too. When you are raised that way, you learn to monitor the room before you monitor yourself. You learn to shape-shift so quickly that your own feelings become an afterthought. You learn to call it empathy, because that sounds more dignified than what it often is: a performance. A constant calculation of how to be safe.
I thought love meant never becoming a burden. Never asking too much. Never asking anything at all. I thought love was anticipating someone’s needs before they had to speak them and shaping yourself accordingly.
It makes sense, then, that I was drawn to dynamics that felt familiar. I was drawn to people I could work for. People I could earn. People who made love feel like something I had to prove I deserved.
There is a specific exhaustion that comes from believing that if you just explain yourself clearly enough, love hard enough, or stay long enough, someone will eventually become who you need them to be. It is a form of hope that looks noble until you realize it is self-erasure.
If I’m honest, it’s not that I didn’t know what I needed. It’s that I didn’t believe I was allowed to ask for it.
In the years since that heartbreak, I have resisted the urge to become smaller in the name of feeling safer. Love is not a test I need to pass. It is something I am allowed to participate in.
I used to offer love the way you offer a peace treaty: carefully, strategically, always ready to compromise first. But confrontation has become sacred to me. Not because I enjoy conflict, but because I understand what it makes possible.
Confrontation protects tenderness from becoming resentment. It keeps intimacy from hardening into distance. It is how you say, This matters to me, without performing indifference to seem dignified.
It is, in its own way, an act of faith. To confront someone is to believe they might meet you there.
And if they don’t, if they can’t, confrontation becomes a different kind of gift. It reveals what you are actually working with. It removes the illusion. It saves you from the slow, quiet heartbreak of staying in a place where your needs will never be met.
This is what I wish I could tell the version of myself sitting in that dark theatre: that tenderness is not weakness, that heartbreak is not proof you loved wrong; it is proof that you loved. And that the goal is not to become unbreakable.
The goal is to become someone who does not abandon herself in the aftermath.
When I return to Call Me By Your Name now, I no longer watch it from the raw edge of heartbreak. I watch it from a distance that feels like wisdom rather than detachment. I watch it as someone who understands that love is not a story that ends when someone leaves.
Love is what remains in you after.
Maybe that’s why I keep returning to that monologue, year after year. Not because it makes the pain smaller.
But because it reminds me that the feeling was worth it.
What Elio’s father is really saying, I think, is that pain is not something to escape at all costs. It is something to integrate. It is part of the price of being human and the cost of being open. It is evidence that you have lived in the direction of meaning.
We spend so much time trying to be cured, but some things are not illnesses. Some things are simply the consequence of having a heart.
And I want to keep mine.