The love story of Noah and Allie from The Notebook is the stuff legends are made of. Whether or not you’ve seen the 2004 book-to-screen adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ novel, you’ve definitely heard of these characters. You’ve seen them kiss in the rain. Maybe it’s because I thought I understood the inevitability of Noah and Allie’s attraction that I never really felt the need to revisit the movie, but now that I have, I’m shocked at how my opinion has changed on Allie’s love triangle with Noah and Lon.
The Notebook became available to stream with a Netflix subscription this month, so I decided since it had been 20 years since my first viewing, it was time to revisit one of the best non-rom-com couples — Allie (Rachel McAdams) and Noah (Ryan Gosling). I had actually forgotten all about James Marsden’s Lon, remembering only that there was some poor schmuck of a Noah placeholder in Allie’s life for a short time. Now that the rewatch has happened, I cannot believe I was ever Team Noah.
In The Noah Vs. Lon Debate, I Always Thought Noah Was The Better Man, Until Now
I was quick to learn there’s a whole debate about whether Allie ended up with the better man. Some have complained for years that Allie chose Noah, while apparently James Marsden still gets accused of being the “asshole” of the movie. Having rewatched it, it is astonishing to me now that there would be anybody in that latter group, and I might not believe it if I hadn’t been there myself.
I think the reason I was able to discard Lon from Allie’s story and then ultimately from my memory so easily is because there was no question that Noah and Allie were meant to be together. They were so passionate!
Allie didn’t want this boring life with the rich man her parents approved of. She wanted this Ken doll who threatened to throw himself from Ferris wheels if she didn’t agree to go out with him and who built Mojo Dojo Casa Houses with his bare hands just hoping she’d come back around.
Also, Noah knew she loved to paint.
That was a big sticking point for me two decades ago and the one Lon-related memory I have from my original viewing of The Notebook. When she told her fiancé she used to love to paint and Lon said he didn’t know that, I was inconsolable. At the time, I was a young adult with a semi-permanent “It’s Complicated” relationship status and an incomplete prefrontal cortex, so I simply couldn’t fathom how Allie could marry this man who did not know her love of painting.
While my opinion has since changed, I give my former self and other Noah sympathizers some grace, because seeing who Noah and Allie came to be — and the way Noah dedicated his final days (weeks? months?) to helping Allie remember, even for 5 minutes at a time — is ridiculously sweet and heartbreaking, and it makes it clear who we’re supposed to be rooting for in this story.
Noah And Allie’s Relationship Just Seemed So Toxic
There’s something to be said for persistence, and I know it’s supposed to be romantic that Noah pretty much fell in love at first sight with Allie and then went after what he wanted. However, I personally didn’t think all of his carnival shenanigans were very endearing. She repeatedly told him she wasn’t interested, and he just kept pushing himself on her, ultimately hanging from the top of a Ferris wheel until she promised to go out with him.
I know this was a different era, but now we know that threatening death or dismemberment in the name of romantic passion is straight-up toxic. It left a bad taste in my mouth, but I was willing to give it a pass in the name of it being set in the 1940s and, you know, fictional. But once they got together, I didn’t find their relationship any healthier.
They were always screaming at each other, and Allie seemed to regularly push Noah or slap him during arguments. Is that a passionate relationship or an abusive one? If I have to ask myself that, maybe I’m not enjoying this couple as much as I should be.
We don’t get to see any of the years they spent together after Allie leaves Lon, when she and Noah were secure in each other and building a family, so it’s anyone’s guess if they dropped some of their unhealthier habits with age. Still, those issues just never seemed present with Lon.
I Kept Waiting For Lon’s Ugly Side To Come Out
Before rewatching The Notebook, I couldn’t remember how Lon and Allie’s relationship ended, but I figured he had to have given us a reason to dislike him. We needed to be firmly back on Noah’s side, right? Wrong.
When Allie surprised Lon at the office in the middle of a meeting, he assured her she was always welcome to stop by unannounced, even clearing the room to prioritize whatever it was she was there for. Then when she said she needed to leave town to clear her head, he asked if she was all right, and when she assured him she was, he said:
Then go. Take your time, do whatever you need to do.
What? Not a sign of jealousy or insecurity? He just wanted her to figure out what she needed so she’d be ready to marry him. Even when he learned she’d been staying with Noah, he didn’t fly off the handle or blast her for being unfaithful. He said he could shoot Noah, kick his ass or just leave Allie, but all three of those options meant losing her.
His only “demand” really was that she choose one or the other, because he didn’t want to share her. (What a bastard!) It broke my heart when he said:
I don’t want to have to convince my fiancée that she should be with me.
To speak again to the painting of it all, did Allie like to paint because it was her passion, or did she turn to painting when her life felt out of control? She had stability with Lon and didn’t think about painting again until she saw Noah in the newspaper. She didn’t pick up a brush again until she had full-on cheated on Lon.
Also, I was wrong back then about Lon not knowing Allie. He may have been joking, but he hit the nail on the head right before he proposed, telling her she’d never marry him because her parents liked him:
If you marry me, then you will have lost the lifelong battle of defiance against them.
In the end, Allie and Noah were together, and that’s the way it was supposed to be. Was Lon better for Allie? Maybe. But he deserved better anyway. Hopefully he took that emotional maturity and shared it with someone who loved him just as much as he loved her.
If you want to take a trip back to one of the best movies of the 2000s and relive Allie and Noah’s (and Lon’s) story, The Notebook is streaming on Netflix. Who knows, maybe time has changed your opinion on the romance as well.
