The Notebook

The Notebook is one of my favorite love movies of all time. The reason I love this movie so much is because that main characters Noah and Allie go through so many trials and finally end up together in the end. This movie I feel shows me how strong their love for each other really was and I now feel as if it is meant to be it will always find a way. Looking at the movie as a reference to get a better understanding of how lifespan development works, I realized that most of the trials that Noah and Allie went though were part of stages of development. The theory of stages of development was created by Erik Erikson, he believes that we go though certain stages in our life and if we do not get passed them properly we will end up with underdeveloped skills in our lives. The Notebook has many different stages that the main characters go though such as, stage eight, integrity vs. despair, stage five, identity vs. identity confusion, and stage six, intimacy vs. isolation. In the beginning of the movie there is an older man reading a book to a woman who we later figure out is Noah and Allie. Allie has Alzheimer’s disease and he is reading her the story of their love. To me this part of the movie lead me to believe that in this point in their lives they were in the last and final stage of Erikson’s theory integrity vs. despair which happens during late adulthood. Mainly Noah was looking back at his life while he read the story he knew without a doubt that he never regretted anything that happened between Allie and him. He knew that he never made a mistake in staying with here at the house she was in. Noah figured that Allie meant everything to him and he did not want to leave her. I believe that Allie as well was looking at her life without really knowing that she was. I say this because she is the one who wrote the book for Noah to read to her so that she could remember him for brief moments in time just to stay with him. I think that as she was writing that story she