This is the moment when everything seems impossible. When there are huge, seemingly impenetrable barriers between the love interests. (To cite a few movie examples, in While You Were Sleeping, it's when Sandra Bullock's character decides to marry coma guy instead of his brother, whom she has fallen in love with, because he won't tell her how he feels; or in The American President, when Michael Douglas torpedoes Annette Bening's environmental legislation in a Washington Hill deal.)
The despair moment has always been the part of the story which stands out in my memory. If the story has been written well, when that moment hits I am living the experience with the characters. I feel all of their pain because I am completely invested in them.
I am also strangely drawn to despair moments that include the apparent death of one of the main characters. I'm not a fan of fridging (hurting/killing a female character to motivate a male character), but there is something primally powerful about a character who truly believes that they have lost the person who defined their existence. (It counts as a faux death rather than fridging if the following criteria have been met: 1) the relationship between the characters has been an ongoing focus of the story so that the readers/audience are invested in both characters; and 2) the "death" is resolved to still give a happy ending.)
I think the reason this particular version of the despair moment resonates with me is because there is a brutal honesty to it. When a character believes their love is gone, they no longer have any reason for fakery or coolness. It's a vulnerable exposure of everything they've been too afraid to say.
One of the earliest narrative memories I have is from a Saturday morning cartoon. I don't even remember which one it was, but I remember the scene vividly. There had been hints of a romantic relationship between two characters (hints I always devoured because even as a child, I was a shipper). One of them was poisoned and despite heroic efforts, died. The other walked away from her bedside, ignoring all the others. He went outside into the rain, fell to his knees and howled his anguish to the skies. (It turned out that she was not dead though! The poison mimicked death so that the bad guy could kidnap her for a reason which I no longer remember but the good guys rescued her and then they went back to the not-saying-anything-to-each-other holding pattern.)
In the TV show Fringe, a romantic relationship develops between Peter and Olivia, the two leads over the course of four seasons. (Spoiler coming for those who haven't seen the show.) At the end of season four, Peter's father shoots Olivia in the head to stop the world from ending. The naked despair on Peter's face as he runs to her side and begs her to be okay is heartbreaking. He is absolutely broken in this moment and I could see the regret for all the lost opportunities where he didn't have the courage to share his feelings. (But it turns out that his father has a way to heal her, once the bad guys are convinced their plan has failed.)
Turning to a book example, in Kristen Ashley's Breathe, the heroine is buried alive with a cell phone to say goodbye to the hero. She tells him that she loves him and she doesn't want him to be destroyed by her death, she wants him to live on and be happy. He is tearing apart the entire town and crossing some serious moral lines in his search because he's realized he doesn't care about anything else, not his profession, not his reputation, nothing except her. Because if he loses her, he loses everything. (He does find her and she's okay.)
These moments don't happen easily. It takes a lot of careful work to make certain the readers/audience are connecting with both characters and want them to succeed. The despair situation needs to feel natural and not contrived, and hopefully it comes as something of a shock. It should violate the happily-ever-after expectation (and then swoop in and make it even happier than expected), convincing the reader/audience that this time might actually be the last.
When it's done properly, it shows a truth that can't be revealed any other way.
Most of us will thankfully never have to experience this kind of pain. Which is good because such deaths are rarely fakes in the real world. But I think the appeal lies in knowing incontrovertibly how someone else feels. If a person throws themselves on a grenade, or shelters you with their body, then that's an instinctive reaction which can't be faked. Losing something makes us realize how much we truly value it and reveals our ego-protective excuses as meaningless. It brings everything into clarity, and real life is rarely clear. But in the stories we read or watch, that moment is priceless.
So it isn't contradictory that I love both the despair moment and romance's promise of hope. The happily ever after is the reason why I love the despair moment because I can trust the author to take me from the pain into joy. And that's what keeps me going.
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