I didn’t cry when I finished It Ends With Us. I just sat there - quiet, heavy - the kind of silence that comes not from sadness, but from recognition. Because Colleen Hoover’s story was never really about romance. It was about patterns, about how love can be both soft and suffocating, healing and destructive. It was about breaking a cycle - and how sometimes, that’s the bravest thing a woman can do.

When I first read the novel, I remember feeling torn. Hoover’s writing is raw, almost painfully so - not elegant, not subtle, but earnest. Lily Bloom felt real: flawed, impulsive, stubborn. The book didn’t romanticize pain; it forced me to sit with it. To watch Lily choose herself, even when that choice broke her heart. It wasn’t perfect - the dialogue often felt exaggerated, the pacing uneven - but the emotional honesty cut deep. You could feel Hoover’s pulse on every page, even when her words stumbled.
Then came the movie. And somehow, all that rawness got polished into something glossy, Instagram-filtered, and emotionally safe.

 I walked out of the theater feeling… nothing. It looked like a love story, sounded like a love story - but it had lost its why. The quiet moments that once ached on the page became too clean, too choreographed. The violence, the trauma, the messy contradictions of loving someone who hurts you - all blurred into something easier to digest. Pretty, but hollow.

I don’t blame Blake Lively. She’s luminous, vulnerable in her own right. But the film treated Lily as a muse, not a woman in survival. It feared her ugliness, her doubt, her anger - the very things that made her human. Ryle’s charm was turned cinematic, his danger too diluted. And Atlas, once the quiet, healing counterpoint, felt almost ornamental - more symbol than person.
Maybe that’s my biggest issue: the movie made it safe.

 And It Ends With Us was never meant to be safe. It was meant to make you uncomfortable, to blur the line between empathy and accountability. To remind us that love doesn’t excuse cruelty, no matter how tender it once was.

Reading the book felt like pressing on a bruise you didn’t know was still there. Watching the movie felt like someone covering it with makeup. Both versions, in their own way, try to make sense of pain - one by confronting it, the other by softening it until it’s barely recognizable.

I know It Ends With Us isn’t literary perfection. It’s sentimental, sometimes manipulative, occasionally simplistic. But it spoke to a generation of women who needed to see themselves in Lily - to know that leaving isn’t weakness, that endings can be beginnings.
 

The film, though, feels like it’s trying to make the same statement - while making sure everyone still looks beautiful doing it.
If the book was a confession whispered at midnight, the movie is a Hallmark card signed in gold ink.
Both say “you deserve better.” But only one makes you believe it.