Over the past week, Overthinking It readers and contributors rose to the Nicholas Sparks challenge. Ten of you signed up for memberships on February 1, so we collectively watched ten Nicholas Sparks movies and recorded a two hour podcast delving into every corner of this body of work.
The Sparkscast is only available to Overthinking It members who have signed up for access to our digital library, but we have learned so much about love during the course of the last week that we needed to share the highlights with the world before Valentine’s Day. Follow these ten steps that take place in every Nicholas Sparks property, and we guarantee that you will have not only a romantic weekend, but a transcendent romantic eternity.
Spoilers follow for EVERY CURRENT (AND FUTURE) MOVIE BASED ON A NICHOLAS SPARKS BOOK. True insight requires great sacrifice.
1. Let your blue-collar roots show…
2. …But don’t forget to show off how cultured and sensitive you are.
3. Surround yourself with old people…
Hollywood worships youth, as is well known. There just aren’t that many good roles out there for actors (and especially actresses) of a certain age. But Nicholas Sparks never got this memo, which is why his supporting casts are littered with AARP members that can act circles around the protagonists: Blythe Danner (The Lucky One), Richard Jenkins (Dear John), James Garner and Gena Rowlands (The Notebook), Darryl Hannah (A Walk to Remember), Alan Alda (The Longest Ride)… we could go on like this for a while, but let’s not stop before we get to PAUL FREAKING NEWMAN (Message in a Bottle), in his antepenultimate feature film role.
Why this helps with romance is anyone’s guess. Maybe the wacky grandma takes on the burden of keeping up the conversation, so that you can focus on standing around looking pretty.
4. … but remember that you yourself can find true love at any age.
That goes for you, 17-year-old Miley Cyrus in The Last Song! It also goes for you, 58-year-old Richard Gere in Nights in Rodanthe! (Not, like, with each other, though. Gross.) The biggest differential is between 40-year-old Josh Duhamel and 24-year-old Julianne Hough in Safe Haven: 16 years. Which would be creepy, if Duhamel didn’t have some kind of freakish anti-aging gene.
5. North Carolina is the most romantic place in the world. Go there now.
60% of the Sparks canon takes place on the North Carolina coast. Louisiana comes in second, with two; South Carolina and Georgia account for one a piece. So pretty much the whole hurricane belt is fair game. And once you’re there…
6. Pray for rain.
If The Notebook taught us anything, it’s that romance works better when you’re soaked to the bone. You know who else got this message? The directors of all of the other Nicholas Sparks movies. People kiss in the rain, under showers, in lakes. They share meaningful glances while walking through the surf. When that fails, they settle for being water adjacent: the young lovers in The Best of Me make out on top of a water tower. There are exactly two movies where this kind of thing doesn’t happen at all, and they were his first two: Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember. The Notebook was the third, and we’ve been trying to catch that lightning rain in a bottle ever since.
7. Write sappy declarations of love, by hand, on paper. Lots of them.
Write them in notebooks. (The Notebook.) Write them in letters that you send by post. (The Longest Ride, Dear John, Nights in Rodanthe.) Write them in letters to be opened in the event of your death. (Safe Haven, The Best of Me.) Write them in letters that you toss into the ocean. (Message in a Bottle.) Ideally, your letters should reveal you to be a rough-hewn modern poet, but this is optional: it’s paper and ink that does the trick. If inspiration fails you, just write “swipe right” on some nice stationary.
8. Perform feats of romantic strength.
9. Make grandiose sacrifices.
“Love requires sacrifice. Always.” This is an actual line of dialogue from The Longest Ride. (They don’t call him Nicholas Subtlety.) Although only men are supposed to perform feats, sacrifice is appealingly unisex. Bye bye, wealth and social standing! (The Notebook.) See you later, my dead dad’s priceless coin collection! (Dear John.) Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, career-making internship in New York! (The Longest Ride.) There’s also, like, six of these where one of the characters decides that he/she is no good for his/her love interest, and tries to perform the ultimate romantic sacrifice by walking away from the relationship. So if you really want to turn up the heat this Valentine’s Day, sell everything you own and tearfully file for divorce.
And then, to really seal the deal…
10. Die.
There are specific gendered versions of this, mind you. If you’re a guy, you want to die suddenly in a last-minute heroic sacrifice that has nothing to do with the plot of the film. (Message in a Bottle: drowned while saving some total randos from a boating accident. Nights in Rodanthe: suffocated when a mudslide hits his Doctors Without Borders clinic. The Best of Me: shot with a sniper rifle by his abusive father just in time for his heart to be transplanted into his love interest’s dying son, and yes this is the plot of an actual movie that had key grips and a theatrical release and everything.)
If you’re a woman, you want a lingering death from cancer — or every once in a while, just to keep it fresh, from unspecified pregnancy-related frailness. (“Die from cancer” works for a surprising number of the standard Cosmopolitan cover teases. “How to leave your man wanting more!” “How to finally lose those last ten pounds!” “Ten daring sex moves that will leave him speechless!”)
As Dan Savage is fond of pointing out, the only outcome for a romantic relationship that counts as successful in our society is for one of the partners to die. So why not cut to the chase?
Want even more insight about the world of Nicholas Sparks? Sign up for a “Well, Actually…” or “Full Harvey” membership and download our two hour Nicholas Sparks Challenge Podcast today!