Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

…movie based on the book by Helen Fielding 

I’ve been wanting to sit and write my thoughts on this movie since I watched it a couple of weeks ago… but I have worried that my views are slightly controversial and it’s held me back, but here goes…

Like millions of other people, I have always loved Bridget Jones and her relatable insecurities and comic mishaps… and my heart goes out to the book author, Helen Fielding, who is a fellow cancer widow. She presumably knows the harsh realities of widowhood and I’m overtly aware that the movie is a Rom Com… which means we expect a couple of leading characters, a meet-cute, the building of the "will they, won’t they” tension, and a perfect balance of comedy and romance… and this movie certainly ticked all those boxes. In addition to which, it is a first of its kind… because it opens the door to showing the world what life might be like as a young widow.

Death is not a rarity in movies, but what is unusual is to see a young widow struggling with the day-to-day world of solo parenting… and for those of us who live that life it’s great to see some of our troubles normalised on a big screen. This kind of reality is obviously needed because it has generated a huge amount of publicity. And I wonder if there in lies the source of my problems with this film… I had read SO much about this movie before I watched it… both within the widow community and in the wider press. And it lead me to expect what Stacey Heale in the Guardian called “the messy, funny, mistake-filled reality of widowhood” and a depiction of solo parenting bereaved young children similar to my own experience… contrasting the pain of loss with an attempt to rediscover joy in the shadow of grief. My expectations were high because this is what I coach many of my clients through… the concept of growing life around grief.

At yet I left the cinema underwhelmed…

Don’t get me wrong, there were parts that were totally relatable… the well-meaning advice from friends, the ability to burn pasta (yes my cooking is that bad!), the feeling that all eyes are on you around a dinner party table, the Barbie doll in the bed disturbing the fun with the 29-year old (ok, perhaps not that one in my world, but we can imagine!), those pitiful looks when you drop the kids at school in your pyjamas, navigating school fairs and parents evenings alone, and the general chaos that we embrace because we quite simply can’t do it all. So, if I laughed out loud and loved seeing the real Bridget again, what left me wanting more?

What was it that I was hoping for?

The first thing I noted was that I wanted it to move quicker… grief to me has been free-fall… somehow I’m eight years into this emotional rollercoaster… and, although it feels like forever, it also seems like yesterday when my husband was ill and we were praying for just one more day with him. A fiery side of me was interested how they would navigate the “widows fire” topic… the desire for sex after experiencing death… because it’s only natural after seeing a life end that human beings would want to reproduce and keep our species alive… and, although Tinder got a mention, there was none of the awkwardness of navigating dates and texting with childcare, nor how to deal with fiery emotions when there’s no possible date in the pipeline, or how weird it can feel starting another relationship whilst still yearning for the person who died. As for when a relationship ends… from my experience it magnified the loneliness stratospherically and the rejection sensitivity became almost unbearable and so much bigger than it ever was pre-grief, but Bridget seemed not to be so affected.

With regards to children’s grief…

I’d heard that this was included and I was fascinated to see how it would be represented… and, whilst there were moments I could relate to, the family side of the movie seemed more idyllic than the messy reality of what has been my reality, which was a disappointment. Childrens grief can be complicated, heartbreaking and messily raw to navigate and we do the best we can with the knowledge and resources we have at the time. In addition, I would love to have seen more about that owl and the links the children had with Mr Darcy, as well as the benefits of therapy, both for us widows as well as our children. From what I’ve seen within my own life and that of my clients, solo parenting bereaved children, whilst trying to process our own emotions, is a tough gig. And one of the biggest struggles is the pain of witnessing the children grow up to realise that their parent never got to know them as they are now and they have very few memories of them… and that our co-parent is no longer here to enjoy our children and the amazing young people they are growing into.

Maybe that’s where my niggles with this movie come from… I’m so immersed in grief education that I wish society was better educated about the Dual Process model (which explains the healing power of smooth oscillation between sitting in our grief and a new world in which we keep busy sorting the Sadmin and getting on with life), the benefits of Continuing Bonds (the links we have with those who have died that enable us to remember them and carry their legacy forwards) and a stronger argument for the uniqueness of grief… and why there are no set “stages” of grief. At yet, somethings in the movie resonated deeply… in particular the letter Bridget wrote to Mark Darcy apologising for numerous things and admitting how she didn’t want to do this alone… that moment resulted in me blubbing with uncontrollable tears and sobs.

And, as for the happy ever after…

Grief has the ability to change us and result in a need to make radical life changes in this solo parenting world… moving house, changing careers, discovering a whole different self… and it kicks up a whole heap of emotions related to the fact that our person never got to witness these changes. One of the biggest changes that many yearn for is to go from solo to finding love again. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried the dating apps (yes they terrified me so much that I haven’t been back since before lockdown!) and I’ve had a couple of failed relationships… but, my mission has been to work my way through the storms of grief to find happiness internally, before looking for it externally. I’ve never been a fan of the term Chapter Two, and maybe my frustrations with this movie are entirely my stuff around this… my struggles with the concept of finding a happy ever after… when I know it is the one thing my late husband struggled with. I feel so lucky to have had sixteen happy years with my late husband and for now my happy ever after is a realisation that no guy (other than the memory of an amazing soul-mate) is better than the wrong guy… and that’s okay.

I often say to my kids, when people say negative things… it is often their stuff not your stuff… so please don’t think that I disliked the movie. Despite the niggles I have with it, I will be forever grateful that this film opens up such an important dialogue… it got me writing this… and something made you want to read it too! And society needs to talk more about the only thing that sadly we will all experience at some point in life. A movie is never going to be loved by everyone and grief is so unique that it will only ever be one perspective… but maybe making it into a Rom Com with a happy ending illustrates the fact that society isn’t ready to admit how heartbreaking the real pain of grief can be. After all, human beings are pre-programmed to be attracted to pleasure and to move away from pain… so, it’s a skill to be able to sit in pain without giving in to the desire to “fix” it… yet, the only way through grief is to feel the feelings and to listen to what they are telling us.

I would absolutely love to hear your comments, please feel free to email and let me know… my email address is: emma@rainbowhunting.co.uk.

In the meantime, I want the last words of this blog to go to Bridget Jones who got this absolutely right:

“And even though there might be 600,000 words in the human language, the world still struggles to find the right ones when someone you love is gone.”