Love Stories

Originally published at humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/11/03/love-stories

We were both young when I first saw you

On a Thai Airways flight back from a short work trip in Bangkok, I noticed an unexpected name amongst the movie options – Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

This was the film that got me interested in theatre and Shakespeare. I had last seen it when I was fifteen, on the free-to-air Channel 5 in Singapore. So it was, that I fell back into the world that Baz Luhrmann and Shakespeare created, as a middle-aged man in his forties.

Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books

I remember being in high school, having barely survived reading The Merchant of Venice for my Secondary Two English literature class, and wanting nothing further to do with the subject. I didn’t understand the play, found the language draggy and foreign, and couldn’t tell the characters apart.

That changed one night when I saw Romeo + Juliet on TV – the punkish modern crime beach setting, the barely adapted Shakespearean language, and a young Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio luminous on the screen. It was a formative experience – I finally understood what Shakespeare could have been like if he had written in modern times.

It was too late to explore literature academically by then, but I ended up joining the theatre club and doing lighting for school plays until junior college. It brought me into a world that I never really dove into, but loved and appreciated – the rehearsals, the emotion, the immersion in a specific story in the darkness of the theatre.

These violent delights have violent ends

With my memories of Romeo + Juliet, I was wondering whether it would be a good movie to show my son one day. My son is four and loves stories and buses. He makes us read the same books about buses to him every night, and is learning phonics at school. I hope he picks up a love of reading like I did, and I had the idle thought that a movie like Romeo + Juliet may well be inspirational.

Most of us, including me, default to thinking about Romeo and Juliet as a positive story of young love when we don’t think too hard. When Taylor Swift sang about Romeo throwing pebbles, I sang along happily, and the only person I know who objected said – “I hate her lyrics – she’s always meeting people everywhere, here she’s meeting someone on the outskirts of town, there she’s meeting someone in the pouring rain, and there she’s enchanted to meet someone.”

But the first thing I noticed rewatching the movie as a parent was that Romeo + Juliet is a young person’s tale. It is not a positive story through a parent’s eyes. Our young characters fall in love over a single night, kiss, marry, sleep together, fight, kill, defy their parents, commit suicide.

As I watched the movie again after more than twenty years and saw the fighting, the gang violence, the sex, the killing and the suicides – I decided that this was indeed not a movie to share with a four-year-old child.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still a good movie. Maybe the characters screamed and emoted a lot more than what I thought necessary, but the Shakespearean dialogue in a modern setting worked better than it had any right to, and Claire Danes as Juliet was just as enthralling as I remembered at fifteen.

Perhaps it would be a good story to share one day with a teenager overcome with hormones and love – I think this tale of Juliet and her Romeo says something true about the intensity of young love and passion. That is why it has survived in the popular consciousness for so long, and sparked many a love for Shakespeare in these centuries past.

Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast

The secret wedding of Romeo and Juliet brings to mind another wedding, and another love story.

This year has been a bumper year for weddings. The most recent one I attended was an army friend’s wedding lunch, held in a bright ballroom by the Singapore River. This friend was the last of our scout group to marry, and this would likely be our last wedding as a group – at least, until our children started getting married. There were six of us around the table that day – and I had gone to each of their weddings, and they had come to mine as well.

I loved these men. We had known each other more than half our lives, yet we met less than once a year now. We had survived field exercises, long walks, and irrational superiors together, and for two years, our lives were each other. Since then, our lives had grown – where in the past we talked about the ridgelines of Kanchanaburi and the swamps of Temburong, we talked now about the traffic in Manila, the food in Jakarta, and the medical treatments available in Bangkok.

The groom was a good man, and kind. He had led a scout team, like me, and we shared tales of how he had plucked herbs in the jungles of Brunei and confidently led the way through dark forests without referring to his compass.

The couple had met through matchmaking technology, a dating app. It was a good match; they even looked alike, the way couples who were meant for each other sometimes do. They had dated for a long time, and his wife and him had made a considered union, in the Singaporean way. He had proposed in mid-2025, they had done a pre-wedding shoot in Yunnan, secured the hotel ballroom, and finally tied the knot in late 2026.

We joked about the fitting of his suit and the long time they took to get ready for the second march in – it was good to be among friends again. More importantly, we gave him, and his lovely bride, all our best wishes for their marriage and their life ahead together.

Different kinds of love stories, and different ways to love.

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

As the plane landed back in Singapore and Romeo + Juliet ended, I had a surprise waiting for me: my heavily pregnant wife with my son at the arrival hall. My suns had come to fetch me back home.

This was one of my earlier flights back as I usually landed late at night, and my wife saw the opportunity to take my son on this adventure. He had been clamouring to travel and we were not able to because of circumstances – this would have to do. My wife and son took the bus together to the airport – he loved the airport, the bus ride, the taxi home, everything about the evening.

My wife caught my eye, smiling and waving, with my son in tow. I couldn’t help but smile as well – this pregnancy has been hard on her and she has barely been able to leave the house these few weeks.

“Papa,” my son said as he ran to me, “I wanted to make sure you didn’t come home too late.”

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