Yeah, you read that right. A never-ending movie, well, technically a looped one. It is a Japanese animated movie series consisting of two films: To Every You I’ve Loved Before and To Me, the One Who Loved You.

And I would definitely recommend you watch these two amazing movies. Unlike most films, these two do not give you one complete story with a beginning, a middle and a satisfying ending, not even an unsatisfying ending. Instead, they give you two different versions of the same story and somehow both feel incomplete without the other.

The interesting part is that either movie can be watched first. Your viewing order actually changes your emotional experience. You might end up seeing the same events from two different perspectives, but the feelings you carry from the first movie will influence how you understand the second one. At first glance, they seem like science-fiction romances about parallel worlds, quantum mechanics and dimension-shifting theories. But beneath all those scientific concepts, there is something much simpler and, perhaps, much heavier. It is about the cost of choosing.

The story revolves around Koyomi Takasaki and the different lives he could have lived. In one timeline, Koyomi falls in love with Shiori Satō. In another, he finds love with Kazune Takigawa. Both relationships are meaningful in their own ways, and both lead him towards different versions of happiness.

But the most confusing part is that you cannot simply decide that one couple is the perfect endgame and the other is a mistake. Because every version of Koyomi has a different life, a different set of circumstances and a different person to love. And no matter which world he chooses, something is lost. That is what makes these movies so fascinating. They do not ask us to decide which life is better. Instead, they make us wonder what happens to all the other possibilities when we finally choose one.

Imagine being able to see every possible version of your life. In one world, you make a different decision. In another, you meet someone you never met in your original timeline. Somewhere else, you take a different path, make a different sacrifice and become a completely different person. Would you still be satisfied with the life you have chosen? Or would you spend the rest of your life wondering what could have happened if you had chosen differently? The question always remains there silently.

There is a particular idea that stayed with me after watching these movies:

“Every choice creates a universe. And every universe demands a sacrifice.”

Perhaps that is why these films feel like a never-ending loop. Every ending takes us back to another possibility. Every choice opens one door while quietly closing several others. And there is no way to experience every version of happiness at the same time.

But I think the story is not really asking us to chase every possibility. It is asking us to understand why we cannot have them all. Think about our own lives. We make choices every single day. Sometimes we choose a career over a comfortable life. Sometimes we leave a place to pursue a dream. Sometimes we choose one person, one opportunity or one direction, knowing that we might never experience the alternatives.

And the difficult part is that we rarely know whether we have made the right choice. We keep thinking about the university we did not attend, the opportunity we missed, the person we could have stayed with or the version of ourselves we might have become if we had taken a different road. We romanticise the lives we never lived because we never had to experience their difficulties.

I think the real beauty of these two movies is that they remind us that happiness does not come from experiencing every possible version of life. Sometimes, it comes from accepting the one we are actually living in.

You cannot protect every version of love. You cannot keep every possibility alive. And you cannot spend your entire life travelling between different versions of yourself, trying to find a world where nothing has been lost. At some point, you have to stop looking at the doors you did not open and learn to appreciate the one you walked through.

Because perhaps the meaning of life is not about making the perfect choice. It is about making peace with the choices we have made.

And maybe, just maybe, that is why these two movies seem to never really end. So, whenever I feel like I could have chosen better, I watch it again because it always reminds me that I can’t have all of it. It is what it is.