Love is sweetest and defined most properly when it is given with no hope of return, with no expectation that you will receive anything other than the hurt and joy that springs from loving another person with all your heart, regardless of their flaws.
Regardless of their oblivion.
Regardless of whether they will not…CANNOT love you back.
Such was the case with Rose and the Doctor.
Sometimes love can be so obvious that one need not even say it but for the sake of assuring the other person.
Often though, the love is quiet, covered by manifold actions that should in fact display the love but instead rather smother it. Either because of ignorance or apathy or taking those things for granted.
Because sometimes when you’re as close to someone as the Doctor was with Rose, you don’t appreciate the relationship as you should.
Perhaps the story of Rose and the Doctor should make us more thankful for the special people in our lives.
Or make us realize that we should speak now and tell someone the truth about how we feel…
After all, Rose Tyler was brave. She choked back her faltering voice as she stood on the lonesome beach in the alternate universe and mustered up the courage to say what she needed to say. “I love you,” she told the Doctor, speaking through her tears.
The Doctor smiled weakly, bitterly. Because although he loved her with both of his hearts, one of them was splitting in two from the pain of knowing that he could never live the rest of his life out with her.
Such is the immortal plight…to fall in love with a human is the most cruel thing their hearts can do to them.
“Quite right too,” said he.
He paused, briefly thinking about whether he should say it before he made his decision.
“And I suppose, it it’s my last chance to say it,” he began, “Rose Tyler…”
But then his image faded from her sight forever, being swept back into the TARDIS because his time there was up.
He stood there in the TARDIS, heart waning and hope destroyed. Oh, he was a fool, a terrible fool. A terrible fool who had succumbed to the heartbreaking realism of love. All his dreams that he wished to come true were but naught, his happy ending could never happen because it would not be an ending nor a beginning, but somehow nothing but an eternity without the love of his long and experienced immortal existence.
He could not make her happy. He could only be happy that she would be able to be happy with his clone, the man with a human heart rather than his own alien pair of hearts.
Tears streaming down his cheeks, he raised his eyes toward the heavens as if begging for one last chance for everything to be made right again, to have mercy on this his wounded excuse for a man, raging against his immortal soul.
He was beaten. He walked away. Away from Rose his eternal love and the life she now lived with him and without him at the same time. He was unable to give her love and unable to receive it.
Still, he was thankful he knew Rose. He had not a single regret. He was better for having known her. For having loved her and experiencing her love for him while they were able to express it, back when they had their many adventures together.
Perhaps Shakespeare was right… It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
The Doctor never forgot Rose Tyler, as she never forgot him.
Perhaps we were all so amazed and saddened at the events that took place over the course of their relationship because it was not a normal love affair at all.
Oh no, it was much bigger. For the Doctor in all his immortal brilliance bestowed his love on a human girl although she was certainly not deserving of it at all, didn’t expect it at all. And the girl, loving the Doctor through her loyalty and faithfulness to him, proved again and again during their adventures in the TARDIS. He protected her, just as she saved him. Their love was otherworldly.
You see, the ending to their love story, although not ideal, was not a failure.
For true love is not that which always experiences happy endings where movie audiences are overjoyed and applaud at the end.
No, true love is sacrificing your own happiness for the benefit of the other. Rose and the Doctor both demonstrated this throughout their series of adventures as well as their reunion on the beach.
True love is loving the other so wholeheartedly that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will do what’s best for them no matter what.
That you will want what’s best for them no matter what.
Even if that doesn’t include you.
Perhaps the Doctor loved Rose Tyler with his two hearts more than any other has loved a woman in the history of all the world.
