The new film (500) Days of Summer declares its theme as the rejection of "The One" in romance. It's the story of young Tom, who thinks Summer is The One for him; they have a cute few months together, but then they're on and off for a year. Summer is glib and won't commit, although we never see what drives her reservations. These facts are pressed by the voiceover to show that Tom's vision of The One is an unsustainable fiction and that Summer's fly-by-night indulgences are the true path.

Narration aside, the story I saw was different. A boy, Tom, falls for a girl, Summer, who simply doesn't fall back in turn. Instead she toys with him and he grows increasingly and understandably frustrated. Why don't they click? We don't know. Does Summer do right by keeping him at half an arm's length? Seems not, to me.

The voiceover draws a further lesson from Tom's events: that "coincidences" determine love more than "fate." And to show this, the film conjures a woman who appears just when Tom is open to a new relationship. But something ineffable (or at least, ineffed) happens between them; they both prick up their ears in this meeting. Surely this mystery is what we wanted explained through the fantasy of "The One": the mystery of that instantaneous reaction—love at first blink, if you will. Here, the coincidence is only that they meet at all—not the source of what we assume to be their special connection.

A more thorough debunking of "The One"—a romance more dedicated to coincidences, that is—would show how love builds inexplicably through unforeseen events, but events which somehow bind the two together: a certain broken kite, the memory of hidden crustaceans revealed in tide pools, a spontaneous word which becomes a regular game. The strange laughter that emerges from long winter nights.

Because unexpected, these event can't support one's personal prophecy of The One. But they are the wings on which fondness is born. And the cement of an intimate existence.