Wuthering Heights and Romantic Ruin
Christa and I went to see Wuthering Heights the other night. Sitting beside my wife, my high school sweetheart, 28 years in, I wasn’t watching it as a teenager swept up in drama. I was watching it as a man who knows marriage is beautiful, costly work.
What surprised me wasn’t the film.
It was the audience.
Throughout the movie, there were loud gasps—the kind of delighted, almost reverent reactions that say, this is epic… this is rare… this is what love should feel like.
I get it. We don’t just watch stories like Wuthering Heights, we project ourselves into them. We feel the electricity. We long for the ache.
But what happens when we interpret intensity for depth?
That was the question I haven’t been able to shake this week. One that led to jotting down a few ideas I’ve picked up along the way.
It’s Easy to Mistake Intensity for Love
Which is why it’s important to see stories for what they are. In this case, a story that’s about tragey. Not romance.
The truth is, Heathcliff and Catherine are not a model of transcendent love. They are a model of obsession, pride, ego, and unresolved trauma colliding at full speed.
Their connection is intense, yes. But it destroys:
Marriages
Children
Generations
Themselves
Nobody walks away whole.
And before I go any further: I’m not standing above this.
I understand the pull of intensity. I know what it’s like to feel that dangerous mix of electricity and validation. None of us are immune to that surge.
That’s what makes this story timeless.
It‘s Easy to Mistake Longing for Legitimacy
That’s Heathcliff’s delusion.
He believes that because he feels something fiercely, it must be sacred. His pain becomes proof. His obsession becomes identity. He confuses an emotional rush with eternal meaning.
But step back from the poetry.
He is unstable.
He is unformed.
He is driven by grievance.
He doesn’t build a life around love, he uses the word “love” to justify destruction. Which is why his desire doesn’t mature him. It shrinks him.
By the end of the story, he is hollowed out by the very obsession he called love.
That’s not romance.
That’s erosion.
It’s Easy to Mistake Fantasy for Faithfulness
That’s Catherine’s delusion.
She speaks in language about shared souls and cosmic bonds. She believes depth of feeling equals depth of truth. And when reality demands sacrifice, when covenant and consequence show up, she refuses to let the fantasy die.
She wants stability and transcendence at the same time.
Security and secrecy.
Marriage and mythology.
So she splits herself in two, feeding the illusion while trying to preserve her world. And that fracture eventually consumes her.
She doesn’t gain freedom.
She collapses under divided loyalty.
Not because she doesn’t feel deeply, but because she interprets those feelings as destiny.
It’s Easy to Sell Weather, Not Wisdom
The wilderness.
The longing looks.
The “no one understands us” energy.
It’s cinematic oxygen for FOMO.
The atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting. The music swells. The glances linger. And somewhere in all that weather, the story starts whispering: “The deepest love is the one that disrupts everything.”
But remove the soundtrack and lighting and what are you left with?
A man without stability.
A woman married to someone else.
A refusal to deal with reality.
A widening circle of damage.
The story works on screen because we don’t have to live inside the consequences. Because in real life, the “electric, magnetic soul connection” becomes:
custody agreements
financial strain
children absorbing confusion
regret once the fantasy quiets
In short: the electricity eventually fades. The fall-out remains. It’s simply what happens when we slowly begin believing a subtle lie:
That intensity equals truth.
That disruption equals depth.
That because something feels powerful, it must be right.
But power and wisdom are not the same thing.
A Better Invitation
The good news is not that desire is bad. It’s that desire needs clarity. Perhaps that’s why Jesus doesn’t shame longing. He exposes what it’s aimed at.
You see, faith in who Jesus already is for us gives us something Heathcliff and Catherine never had: the freedom to let illusion die without losing ourselves. That death is not the end of life—it’s the beginning of it.
Trusting Jesus means we don’t have to be ruled by the loudest feeling in the room. We can step back from the wind and the weather and ask:
Does this build life?
Does this protect what I’ve been given?
Does this align with the steady love of the One who has already chosen me?
These gut checks matter in a world that romanticizes disruption as depth. But intensity isn’t destiny. The better story is quieter, and it builds what survives the storm.