A Neighborhood of Love: Valentine Day

In the next 48 hours you will see a lot of lame stories about love and Valentine’s Day.  Then, the lucky ones will see this one.  A piece about a culture of love.  Here is Boyd Huppert and Jonathan Malat to tell the story.

Questions:
-How did the “love seat” idea strike you?
-Was there any need to explain what they were doing with the seat?
-The man whose wife lives with Alzheimer’s is deep within the story. Is that the right place? Where would it be different if that had been at the top? What about the middle surrounded by couples still together. Putting him where Boyd and Jonathan did allows him to stand alone in the piece, add some stark reality. The most power part of the story, to me, comes when he says loves grows deeper when you face a tragedy like this.
-I do wonder how, living in a neighborhood where long marriages are the norm, how that influences(d) couples. Is there a way to encourage a culture of marriage? What would you find in their families? Did they pass it on? Is is not the same story, but I would be interested enough to ask.
-Imagine you want to turn this into a web interactive-extend the story beyond this story. What could you do? I would start with a map, allow people to enter the number of years they have been married on the map of the Twin Cities and see what we come up with. Maybe drop colored pins sorted by decades or something.)
-Years ago I saw a story that was the opposite of this. John Larson walked through a courthouse in Oklahoma to find every single person he encountered in the marriage license office, and even in divorce court, every clerk and every lawyer and even the judge had been touched by divorce, either their own (some multiple times) or their children.