4 ideas
Love is a solitary experience of the lover, who invents an inner world around a beloved who may be anyone, however unworthy; the value lies in the lover's own awakening, not in the beloved. For this reason most people would rather love than be loved, and the beloved often comes to fear and hate the lover, whose devotion strips them bare.
Miss Amelia Evans, a hard, solitary moneymaker in a Georgia mill town, takes in her hunchbacked cousin Lymon, and her love for him turns her store into a warm café that becomes the town's only shared social life. Her ex-husband Marvin Macy, whom she married for ten days and humiliated by refusing him her bed, comes back from prison. Lymon becomes devoted to him, and on Groundhog Day, just as Amelia is winning a fistfight against Macy, Lymon jumps on her back and throws the fight. The two men wreck the café and leave, and Amelia shuts herself away while the town goes dead.
In a place where life is cheap and people feel worthless, a shared public space with its own customs of manners and courtesy gives people a sense of their own dignity. The café's value does not come from its liquor or food. It comes from the social ritual that lets people feel they matter, even briefly, and when the space goes, that sense of worth goes with it.
When love is refused and humiliated, it can turn into a patient, aimed hatred that tries to take from the rejecter exactly what they came to love. Marvin Macy, spurned by Amelia, destroys her by winning over the one person she loves. This shows how revenge copies the shape of the original wound.