The Longest Ride

“She’d always been a bit of a loner, and, unlike a lot of people in the house, she didn’t live and die by the rules of the sorority.”

The four principal characters in the novel share a common trait: They do not fit in. Ruth is a Jewish Austrian woman fleeing Nazis; Luke is a cowboy, deeply wary of entangling relationships; Ira is a small business owner in an age of big department store growth. Here, we see that Sophia also is an outsider: a displaced New Jerseyite, an art major surrounded by friends in more practical fields, someone who’s never embraced the sorority lifestyle.

“But the girl on the railing interested him. There was something different about her, though he couldn’t pinpoint what. Maybe, he thought, it was the unguarded, almost vulnerable way she stared into the distance.”

The romance novel genre places huge value on the moment of initial attraction. Here, when Luke first spies Sophia at the off-campus mixer, he instantly experiences a mystical connection with her, seeing in her the opposite of his own social affect: She is emotionally open, not closed off.

“She studied him. ‘Tell me something you don’t usually tell people.’”

Sophia surprises Luke the first time they meet by asking him to share something he has never shared with anyone. Love can only flourish in a relationship built on transparency. Luke and Sophia’s relationship only commences when Luke finally opens up about the nature of his head injury.

“That was our beginning. It’s not a thrilling tale of adventure or the kind of fairy-tale romance portrayed in movies, but it felt like divine intervention. That she saw something special in me made no sense at all.” 

The novel wants to have it both ways. Here, it claims that its love stories are not the pixie-dust trappings of fairy tales or the clichés of Hollywood. But of course, romance novels as a genre are incredibly tightly structured, with iron-clad tropes that readers expect.

“Look at our life, at the trips we took, the adventures we had. As your father used to say, we shared the longest ride together, this thing called life, and mine has been filled with joy because of you.”

If the most obvious longest ride in the novel is Luke’s final championship ride on Big Ugly Critter, Ruth’s specter here suggests that married life itself is also a long ride—a scary, challenging, but also glorious and joyful experience. 

“On its face they had no chance at all, but the image of her sitting in the bed of his truck under the stars kept replaying in his mind, and he found himself wondering if, maybe, just maybe, there was a chance that they could somehow make it work.”

Ira is shy and unwilling to make the first move with Ruth when he first sees her outside the synagogue. Similarly, here, Luke worries about reconnecting with Sophia, an artsy girl from New Jersey who might be his soul mate. 

“It wasn’t long, it wasn’t heated, but as soon as their lips came together, she knew with sudden certainty that nothing had ever felt so easy and so right, the perfect ending to an unimaginably perfect afternoon.” 

There is nothing normal about a kiss in Nicholas Sparks’ love story. A kiss is anything but a kiss. This kiss is a complex moment, a biological touch that ignites an emotional, even spiritual rush. Sophia and Luke’s first kiss is perfect—in the fantasy world of the novel, it indicates that their love is real.

“You think you are not interesting enough or smart enough, but you are those these things too and that you are not aware of your best qualities is part of your charm. You always see so much in others—as you did in me. You made me feel special.”

Ruth admonishes Ira for never believing he was worth falling in love with. In this passage, Ruth suggests that love sometimes defies common sense— two ordinary people together can become special, even extraordinary. The heart sees what others’ eyes do not.

“Why are you here?”

This question, posed by Luke, is the central question of the novel. In whispering the question to Sophia, Luke acknowledges the overwhelming illogic of them falling in love and his need to understand why, despite their obvious differences in background and temperament, she is there with him. Sophia’s answer is as simple as it is complicated: because she wants to be.

“Maybe […] [w]hat I do know is that when I was sitting with you that night, I felt like God was telling me that I was doing the right thing.”

In the novel, love is more than sex or marrying within one’s station. The novel dismisses the shabby desperation of the horny frat boys Sophia watches or the calculating marriage strategies of Ruth’s friends. Instead, Sparks wants to create a sense that love has a mystical, supernatural rightness. Even though staying with Ira means not having biological children, Ruth feels that the cosmos endorses their love.

“That wasn’t why I bought the paintings. I bought them because you were passionate about them […] I bought them to make you happy. I bought because I’m selfish.”

Ira makes the initial investment in six paintings not because he is a savvy investor or even because he is an art aficionado. He buys the paintings to make Ruth happy, and her happiness makes him happy. This dynamic is central to love.

“All she really knew was that she was here with Luke, and that spending time with him made her feel like she was finally, truly, moving forward somehow.” 

Sophia is at a crossroads in her life. When she worries about completing a degree the promises at best an uncertain career, only the presence of Luke reassures her that she is on the right path. She may not know where her life is going but she knows that she will not be going alone.

“I did not find [Ruth’s] letter until after she was gone, but in many ways, it saved my life. She knew I would need it, for she knew me better than I ever knew myself.” 

The letter that Ruth writes to Ira knowing she is going to die and leave him alone testifies to both the power of their love and the therapeutic intervention of letters. In the novel, letters can literally, not metaphorically, be life savers. As Ira reads Ruth’s letter, he is willing himself to die—her letter gives him the encouragement to use his memories to handle his grief.

“My feeling is, if it was meant to be, we’ll figure it out […] we’ll find a way to make it work.” 

In his taciturn and gruff way, Luke here hits on the faith and hope that people put in love. The universe has no apparent operating system. It is driven by chaos, ruled by chance. Nevertheless, love makes it seem like somehow the universe will work to ensure that “things,” whatever that means to a person, will move toward stability and meaning.

“For her part, Ruth would eventually come to love [Daniel] as a son. I know that in this day and age, it’s considered inappropriate to use such a word when describing a teacher’s feeling for a student […] but hers was a motherly love.”

The complex feelings that Ruth feels for Daniel, the abused and lonely third grader in whom Ruth as teacher takes proprietary interest, defy the notion that boundaries need to be in place between students and teachers. The infertile Ruth feels her maternal compassion for Daniel and offers him a loving home. That she is denied this is a central tragedy in her life.

“Late at night, as I lay in the half-empty bed unable to sleep, I would feel the dampness trickling off my cheeks. I’d wipe my eyes and be struck anew by the finality of Ruth’s absence.” 

Ira is a widower struggling nine years later to accept the finality of his wife’s death. His pain and loneliness never go away. Ira’s tears testify that her absence has become a kind presence.

“Why, after everything had been so easy and comfortable for so long, had everything so quickly gone wrong?” 

Despite sticking to all of the tropes of the romance genre, the novel frequently asserts that its love stories are not straightforward or easy. Hinging on seemingly impossibly painful moments—Ira telling Ruth he is sterile, or here, Luke telling Sophia that he competes knowing the next fall could kill him—the novel dramatizes crises while always providing the same solution to any obstacle: love.

“You should have died, but you didn’t […] You were given a second chance. Somehow it was ordained that you should have the chance to live a normal life […] it doesn’t make sense to me why you’d want to risk that.”

Sophia’s emotional plea for Luke to stop competing despite the risk of losing the family farm invokes the novel’s sense of a sapient, actively engaged universe—a spiritualism that sidesteps God, but does not reject supernatural forces like the ghost of a loved one or relentless good luck.

“This should frighten me, but it doesn’t. In no small way, I have been waiting to die for the last nine years. I was not meant to be alone. I am not good at it.” 

Ira knows he is dying, if not from his injuries then from lung cancer. Ira’s confession to the specter of his wife encapsulates the impact of death of a spouse on the one who survives. He does not want to survive alone and anticipates his death as a reunion with Ruth.

“My plea to you is this: despite your sadness, do not forget how happy you have made me; do not forget that I loved a man who loved me in return, and that was the greatest gift I could ever have hoped to receive.” 

Ruth’s heartwarming letter, written just before her own death, offers wisdom for her true love: Remember the gift we were given, the love that we found, the life that we shared.

“If we’d never met, I think I would have known that my life wasn’t complete. And I would have wandered the world in search of you, even if I didn’t know who I was looking for.” 

Ira believes that Ruth was his only possible soulmate, and here, Ruth assures Ira that, had they never met, she would have known that her life was not complete. She believes she would have spent her life searching for the essence of Ira, even if she was not entirely sure who exactly Ira was.

“With you, my life felt indeed like a fantastic adventure—despite our ordinary circumstances, your love imbued everything we did with secret riches. How I was lucky enough to share a life with you, I still cannot understand.” 

Ira’s last anniversary letter to Ruth invokes the power of love and the feeling that the universe is actively participating in the lives of humans.

“Though the art is beautiful and valuable beyond measure, I would have traded it all for just one more day with the wife I always adored.” 

The exorbitant market value of the Ira and Ruth Levinson Collection in the end gives Luke and Sophia financial stability and choices. Ira’s codicil points out that the value of the collection is nothing compared to the love he still has for Ruth, with whom he collected the paintings.