By Zyra Lentija
February is usually dressed up as the month of love: flowers, chocolates, curated happiness. But real love, the kind that changes lives, rarely looks that clean. Sometimes it looks like a drunk mentor slumped over a table. Sometimes it smells like failure, regret, and grief. Sometimes it looks like Haymitch Abernathy.
In The Hunger Games[i], Haymitch is easy to dismiss. He’s sarcastic, bitter, and drunk more often than not. He doesn’t look like a hero. Yet beneath the mess lies one of the most profound portraits of love in the series: costly, quiet, and self-giving.
Haymitch’s story invites us to rethink what love really is.
Love After the Games Are Over
Haymitch won the 50th Hunger Games.[ii] That should have been his happy ending. Instead, it became the beginning of a lifetime sentence.
He survived by outsmarting the Capitol, using the arena itself as a weapon. For that act of intelligence and defiance, the Capitol punished him brutally: killing the people he loved. From that moment on, Haymitch learned a devastating lesson: loving openly gets people killed.
So, he drinks. He distances himself. He pretends not to care.
But here’s the truth that Suzanne Collins quietly insists on: pain doesn’t erase love; it often deepens it.
Paul Wadell, in The Primacy of Love, argues that love is not a feeling we wait to have—it is a choice to seek the good of others, even when it costs us. Love, Wadell says, is what makes us human. Without it, we become hollow. Haymitch is hollow, but not empty.
Love Without Sentimentality
Haymitch does not mentor Katniss and Peeta because it’s fun. He does it because it’s necessary. He doesn’t give inspirational speeches. He doesn’t comfort them with false hope. Instead, he does something far more loving: he takes responsibility. He studies the Capitol. He manipulates sponsors. He absorbs the hatred, so they don’t have to. He carries the emotional weight of knowing that one mistake could mean their deaths. That is love stripped of romance.
For senior high students, this looks like the teacher who believes in you when you don’t believe in yourself. For college students, it’s the friend who stays up with you during burnout season. For adults, it’s the quiet drudgery of parenting, caregiving, or showing up to work when you’re exhausted but needed.
Love, as Wadell describes, is not about self-expression; it’s about self-giving.[iii] Haymitch gives what he has left, even when he feels broken.
Why Love Hurts and Why We Still Choose It
Haymitch knows the cost of caring. He’s seen what the Capitol does to people who love too much. Yet when Katniss and Peeta enter the arena, he chooses to love again. That choice is astonishing because love always risks loss.
Wadell writes that love makes us vulnerable,[iv] but it’s a vulnerability worth embracing because love is what makes life meaningful. To refuse love is to refuse life itself. Haymitch could have checked out completely. He could have treated the tributes like numbers. Instead, he invests emotionally, even though it reopens his wounds.
How many of us do the opposite? We pull away because we’ve been hurt. We stay guarded because caring is tiring. We say, “I’m fine on my own,” when really, we’re just afraid. Haymitch reminds us that numbing ourselves is not the same as surviving.
Becoming More Than Our Trauma
One of the most powerful things about Haymitch is that his pain doesn’t disappear, but it also doesn’t get the final word. He is not healed. He is not sober all the time. He is not inspirational in the usual sense. And yet, he loves.
That’s important for anyone who feels they’re “not okay enough” to care for others. You don’t need to be whole to love. You don’t need to be perfect to give yourself. You don’t need to have everything figured out. Love often happens even when we’re still hurting.
Wadell insists that love forms us morally, shaping who we become.[v] By choosing to protect Katniss and Peeta, Haymitch slowly reclaims his humanity. Love does not erase his suffering, but it gives it meaning.
A February Question Worth Asking
This February, instead of asking: “Who loves me?” “What am I getting?” “How do I feel?” Maybe the more life-changing questions are:
Who needs me to show up? Where is my presence needed?
Where am I being asked to give, not perform?
How can I love even when I’m tired and broken?
These questions shift attention from self-protection to self-giving and responsibility.
Haymitch’s love isn’t loud. It doesn’t post well on social media. It doesn’t look good on a card. But it saves lives. And maybe that’s the kind of love the world is still desperate for: not perfect, not painless, but the stubborn, costly love that refuses to let others face the arena alone.
Footnotes
[i] Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008).
[ii] Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping (New York: Scholastic Press, 2025).
[iii] Paul Wadell, Primacy of Love: An Introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas (Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 54.
[iv] Ibid., 75.
[v] Ibid., 87 and 102. “To say that love is the key to our moral deliverance, and to identify it as a passion, is to know that our perfection comes by receiving a good we not only lack, but by nature are incapable of giving ourselves. As human beings we stand in absolute need: we come to wholeness only by suffering a good other than our own” (87).
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