The Devotion Project

A friend of mine shared a YouTube link a few days back with the title, The Devotion Project. And it is the most poignant short film I ever saw.

Devotion (noun): 1. profound dedication; 2. earnest attachment to a cause, person etc. (dictionary.com)

According to their website, The Devotion Project is a series of short documentary portraits of LGBT couples, examining and celebrating their commitment and devotion. This first short film in the series, "More than Ever" documents Bill Campbell and John Hilton's 54-year love story. It won the Audience Award for Best Short at Newfest: The New York LGBT Film Festival (and it won my heart). 

It is only less than ten minutes, watch the film here:

Beautiful story.

54 years! That is 4536 gay relationship months or 378 gay relationship years! (Funny, they say that for every month you are in a same-sex relationship, it is multiplied by seven months)

After watching the film -- and also being a counseling psychologist and a gay-relationship-advocate wannabee, I asked myself, what was their secret? I want to know their secret because I know it is not easy. I had two 3-year relationships and currently working on another one (Oh incidentally, we are celebrating our third month today and this film is a sweet reminder that sometimes it hurts but sometimes it also last in love instead!)

But I discovered one secret and John Hilton wrote it last July 2011 in Life Lesson with Bill Campbell.

"How can love be profane if it really is love?," he asked. 

"Every day of our life together, Bill and I valued more and more, the privilege of spending our life with each other. We quickly admonished ourselves about any feelings of guilt about our happiness but instead concentrated to understand it as the very evidence we perpetually sought that we were living in the right way."

 The director and producer Anthony Osso shared the birth of this project. Watch it here:

My prayer tonight: "I want to be like that and I can do that too."