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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 


Soulmate, Myself:
The Perfect Mate

Adrienne and Rocky

 

 

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Adrienne and Rocky

'what are we going to do'

Kairissi. This is not just a movie about boxing. This is a love story.

Without Adrienne, Rocky would have been delivered still-born at the box office, and today no one would remember any of it. Stallone the script writer came to realize this.

I think the entire heart and center of the movie revolves about her pained concern, "What are we going to do?"

 

 

Kairissi. In the Netflix biography “Sly”, script-writer Stallone confesses to a major realization 50 years ago. He’d hired a girl to type his script, but then she made disturbing comments, to the effect, “I don’t like Rocky. He's not a nice person. He hurts people. He’s just a thug working for a mafia loan-shark. I don’t want to see this movie.”

Elenchus. This is not what a script-writer wants to hear.

K. Stallone came to understand that his low-budget sports movie was in serious trouble. He then revamped the whole thing and injected several humanizing elements.

E. These “humanizing elements” took the form of a love affair.

K. It’s rather astonishing. When people think of Rocky, they might bring to mind rags-to-riches, an epic adventure of a fourth-rate fighter who unexpectedly finds his true self and becomes a world champion. But what is often forgotten is that his lover, Adrienne, also becomes a majestic butterfly escaping caterpillar form.

E. Adrienne had been beaten down, in terms of her own self-image, by parents and brother - said she was no good, that nobody would ever want her. She glances at her feet a lot, can't look someone in the eyes.

K. But then, with Rocky’s encouragement, she comes out of herself, makes her debut as this icon of brilliant feminine loveliness, the glorious swan, once despised as the ugly duckling.

E. What a gorgeous woman.

K. Absolutely.

E. It's been said that all women, who know they're worshipped and adored, are beautiful.

K. There's a radiation. And what's remarkable, too, is that each of them, each for the other, sees the other's inner potential beauty well before it blossoms as reality.

E. I think what you're saying, right here, is one of the best ways of describing true love. It's a kind of x-ray vision.

K. But, Elenchus, let me tell you what I think is the center of this love story.

E. They’re in bed, he can’t sleep, and he goes out walking, thinking about the upcoming match with Apollo. He comes back, sits on the edge of the bed, and admits to her his fears: “I can’t do it,” meaning, “Who am I kidding? I’m just a bum in the neighborhood, and Apollo is world-class. I can’t do this.”

K. I think what happens next says volumes about Adrienne and about true love. She doesn’t try to give him an empty pep-talk on how he can do it, but honors his thoughts. She puts her hand on his shoulder and speaks heart-to-heart: “What are we going to do?”

E. This is amazing, really.

K. There was not a hint of “How could you let me down this way?” or “I’m disappointed because it’s your job to make me happy” - none of that ego-centrism.

E. She didn't see two individuals but a unit.

K. Yes, a unit… a sacred “one person”… and, if he chose to proceed, she would be in that ring with him, and take those blows with him… And I think all this comes very close to an ultimate definition of the real marital love… whatever life holds for us, we will face it together... because I am with you, and part of you, and will never leave you.

E. And this is the real reason why this boxing movie is remembered, and revered, 50 years later.

 

 

Editor's last word: 

Rocky versus Apollo, by Leroy Neiman

Early in round one of Rocky I, Apollo, the over-confident taunting smirker, is unexpectedly knocked to the mat, and comes very near to being KO’d.

I’ve seen this movie many times over the years, and this scene, right here, is still shocking to me. And I have to ask, why is the emotional impact so great, why the outsized visceral compulsion?

apotheosis for one couple

The answer, it seems to me, is the context. This is not just a boxing match but a spectacular underdog event situated within the metamorphosing lives of Adrienne and Rocky. And this makes the near knock-out something mesmerizing, part of the rise to apotheosis for one couple, and the enduring dynamic of their love story.

against all odds

Stated differently, we cheer for Adrienne and Rocky because, in reality, we are cheering for ourselves and the some-day prospect, against all odds, of living a life of true love.

 

 

'what are we going to do'

 

Elenchus: I'd like you to comment on lovers' "we" -- it's a different kind of "we" meaning "one."

ChatGPT: When lovers say “we are alone”, they’re describing a psychological and spiritual consolidation that happens at the deepest levels of attachment.

1. The merger is not loss of self but coherence of selves.
In profound connection, each person’s inner architecture aligns so cleanly with the other’s that the boundary between “my solitude” and “your solitude” becomes permeable. The solitude becomes shared rather than displaced.

2. “We” becomes the fundamental unit of experience.
In ordinary relationships, “I” remains the default pronoun, even when affection is strong. But in a true pair-bond of the highest order, the psyche reorganizes: the couple becomes a single locus of meaning. “We” isn’t a linguistic flourish — it’s a structural reality.

3. Solitude itself changes character.
Where individual solitude is a kind of existential echo chamber, the shared solitude of lovers is a quiet world that belongs only to them. It’s not isolation, but an enclave — a territory of two where neither is diminished.

4. This merged identity arises from deep recognition.
The phenomenon occurs only when both feel “seen into.” That recognition is so total that the mind spontaneously integrates the other into its sense of being. The inner monologue begins to include the other person’s presence, implicitly and continuously.

5. The shared “we-aloneness” is a marker of completion, not dependency.
It doesn’t mean neediness or fusion pathology. It means: I am still myself, but I am no longer the whole story. The relationship becomes the higher-order context in which both selves exist.

6. It is a rare state — not produced by romance, but by resonance.
Most couples never reach it. It appears only when the relationship touches that level of matched clarity, matched integrity, matched inner velocity — where the two selves feel they arose from the same interior landscape.

In sum:
When lovers speak of “we” being alone, they are reporting a shift in the architecture of identity: an emergence of a shared self that does not erase individuality but supersedes it. The solitary “we” is the natural language of a connection that exists at the level where the soul recognizes its counterpart.