February tends to flatten love into gestures: roses, dinners, grand declarations. So, for a change of pace…
…this month’s list looks at love sideways.
Sometimes it’s the center of the narrative. Sometimes it’s barely named at all. But it’s present—shaping decisions, softening moments, or undoing them. It’s there in the margins: between illness and ambition, between memory and loss, between people who meet too late, or stay too long, or never quite say the thing they mean.
There are no guarantees here—of permanence, reciprocity, or happy endings. Love, in these adaptations, has to negotiate with the rest of life: with time, with class, with geography, with illness, with identity, with the versions of ourselves we’re still becoming.
With that in mind, here’s a collection of love stories that treat intimacy as something fragile and contingent, shaped by circumstance rather than destiny.
- A Single Man | 2009 | 100 minDirected by: Tom FordGenre: Romance, Drama
A Single Man, adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s novel, follows a college professor navigating a single day after the loss of his long-term partner. Immaculately controlled and quietly aching, the film observes grief as something stylised, internal, and relentlessly present. Love here is not loud; it’s something that has already happened and refuses to loosen its grip.
- A Suitable Boy | 2020 | 6 epsDirected by: Mira Nair
Genre: Drama, Romance
A Suitable Boy, adapted from Vikram Seth’s novel, unfolds across post-independence India as one young woman’s marriage prospects become a lens on family, class, and political change. Patient and expansive, the series treats love not as rebellion, but as negotiation—between desire, duty, and inherited expectations.
- Brooklyn | 2015 | 111 minDirected by: John CrowleyGenre: Romance, Period Drama
Brooklyn, adapted from Colm Tóibín’s novel, follows a young Irish immigrant torn between two countries and two possible lives. Soft-spoken and emotionally precise, the film captures how love can feel like belonging—and how choosing one future inevitably means mourning another.
- Cobalt Blue | 2022 | 112 minDirected by: Sachin KundalkarGenre: Drama, Romance
Adapted from Kundalkar’s own novel, Cobalt Blue examines desire from three perspectives within the same family. Love here is quiet, unreciprocated, and deeply destabilising—less a union than a fracture that forces each character to confront who they are.
- Forgotten Love | 2023 | 140 minDirected by: Michał GazdaGenre: Drama, Romance
Based on Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s novel, Forgotten Love leans into melodrama but grounds it in loss and recognition. Memory loss becomes the obstacle love must outwait, raising questions about whether affection survives identity itself.
- If Beale Street Could Talk | 2018 | 119 minDirected by: Barry JenkinsGenre: Romance, Drama
If Beale Street Could Talk, adapted from James Baldwin’s novel, follows a young Black couple whose future is interrupted by a wrongful arrest. Told through memory, voiceover, and lingering glances, the film frames love as both refuge and resistance—something tender enough to survive intimacy, yet fragile under systemic injustice.
- Lie With Me | 2022 | 98 minDirected by: Olivier PeyonGenre: Romance, Drama
Lie With Me, adapted from Philippe Besson’s novel, follows a middle-aged writer who unexpectedly encounters the man he loved in his youth, reopening a relationship shaped by secrecy and silence. Moving between past and present, the film treats first love not as something left behind, but as something that endures—unchanged by time, yet heavy with what was never spoken.
- Lost Illusions | 2021 | 150 minDirected by: Xavier GiannoliGenre: Period Drama
Lost Illusions, adapted from Honoré de Balzac’s novel, follows a young poet who arrives in Paris believing talent will be enough. Drawn into journalism, salons, and strategic romances, he learns how ambition is shaped—and often corrupted—by money, power, and class. Elegant and unsparing, the film treats love and idealism as parallel illusions, both eroded by a society that rewards spectacle over sincerity.
- Love in the Big City | 2024 | 8 epsDirected by: Hur Jin-hoGenre: Comedy, Romance, Drama
Love in the Big City, adapted from Park Sang-young’s novel, follows a queer man and his best friend as they move through love, heartbreak, and self-invention in contemporary Seoul. Episodic and emotionally candid, the series treats romance as something messy and provisional, shaped as much by friendship, shame, and survival as by desire itself.
*If a full eight-episode run feels like too much, there’s also a film adaptation you could check out.
- Maurice | 1987 | 140 minDirected by: James IvoryGenre: Romance, Period Drama
Maurice, adapted from E.M. Forster’s novel, follows a young man coming to terms with his sexuality in Edwardian England, where desire must be hidden, and love carries real risk. Told with restraint and emotional clarity, the film traces how intimacy becomes an act of defiance against social expectation. Quietly radical in its insistence on happiness, Maurice imagines love not as tragedy, but as something worth choosing, even when the world forbids it.
- Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day | 2008 | 92 minDirected by: Bharat NalluriGenre: Comedy, Romance
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, adapted from Winifred Watson’s novel, follows a displaced governess whose life unexpectedly opens up over the course of a single, chaotic day in 1930s London. Swept into a world of theatrical romances and social possibility, she experiences love and self-worth not as destiny, but as sudden permission. Light on its feet and quietly affirming, the film treats romance as a brief interruption—one that changes how a life is imagined afterward.
- Mrs. Winterbourne | 1996 | 105 minDirected by: Richard BenjaminGenre: Romance, Drama
Mrs. Winterbourne, inspired by the novel I Married a Dead Man, follows a young woman who survives a train accident and is mistakenly assumed to be someone else, and welcomed into a family grieving a loss that isn’t hers. Living under an adopted identity, she finds herself forming genuine bonds and an unexpected romance shaped by tenderness and deceit. Softly melodramatic and earnest, the film treats love as something that can grow even in borrowed lives, asking whether truth matters more than the care that has already taken root.
- One Day | 2024 | 14 epsDirected by: Molly MannersGenre: Romance, Drama
One Day, adapted from David Nicholls’ novel, revisits the same two people on the same date each year, tracing how friendship, attraction, and missed timing evolve over decades. By stretching the story into episodic form, the series lingers longer on emotional drift—on what almost happens, and what takes too long to be named. Tender and quietly devastating, it frames love as something shaped less by feeling than by timing, hesitation, and the slow accumulation of ordinary days.
*There’s also a movie adaptation starring Anne Hathaway that you could try, though I’d still recommend the series.
- Our Souls at Night | 2017 | 101 minDirected by: Ritesh BatraGenre: Romance, Drama
Our Souls at Night, adapted from Kent Haruf’s novel, follows two widowed neighbors who form an intimate companionship late in life by simply keeping each other company through the night. What begins as a practical arrangement deepens into something quietly radical—tenderness without apology, desire without spectacle. Gentle and deeply humane, the film reframes love as presence, suggesting that intimacy does not diminish with age, but changes its shape.
That’s Part One.
If even one entry here nudged you toward a book you hadn’t planned to read or a film you weren’t sure you were ready for, then this was worth putting together.
Part Two awaits in the next newsletter.
— Piggy x
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