Love and passion is costly yet fulfulling in the end

Nina Mosley embodies the values of passion, risk-taking, vulnerability, and realism. Her passion is evident when she moves to New York to pursue her photography career. She takes bold risks in her personal life and career, embracing uncertainty to achieve her desires. Nina’s vulnerability shines in her relationship with Darius, where she opens herself to love as he provides a space of mutual understanding. Her realism grounds her approach to love, reflecting the complexities of romance—vulnerability, excitement, confusion, depression, and the occasional game-playing. These core values shape Nina’s motivation, influencing her to approach or avoid different situations.

Endogenous instrumentality is seen in Nina’s interest in being transparent with Darius before going to New York to potentially resolve issues with Marvin, her ex-boyfriend. Endogenous instrumentality is the utilization of tasks related to one’s future goals. In this case, Nina’s goal is to get closure with Marvin before continuing her relationship with Darius. Nina uses endogenous instrumentality to seek advice to approach Darius as she wants to continue pursuing the “possibility of love.” She is also utilizing this opportunity to pursue the possibility of her photography career progressing in New York when she visits Marvin.

Nina’s values change over time as she develops throughout the movie. We first see her vulnerability in heartbreak with Marvin in the movie's very first scene. Nina is standing in their shared empty apartment and confiding in her best friend Josie that she will never make the same mistake twice of falling in love because it is played out. In this conversation Nina is considering how this situation places value on her future. Throughout this movie, directors place scenes of Nina looking back both physically and hypothetically, weighing the cost of her current experience's implications to her future goals of love and her career. We see Nina seeking feedback from her friend Josie in multiple situations and navigating feedback monitoring, monitoring information that she encounters throughout different movie scenes. Considering future time perspective, the value of extension, and the perception of how far away an individual is from their goal, Nina is constantly weighing her life's options in relation to her goals of love and photography. For example, in her conversation with Josie, Nina discusses how to approach or avoid telling Darius about her situation with Marvin. Nina and Darius’ relationship is progressing despite their disclosure that they are just ‘kicking it’ to downplay their strong feelings for one another.

We also see Nina’s passion in scenes of being an assistant to a mainstream photographer in the city of Chicago and in redirection as a part-time photographer at a local shopping center. Nina’s passion for photography is evident as she is willing to take even small gigs where she is not the lead photographer to do what she loves: capture real moments of life through her eyes and showcase their beauty as art.

Nina’s values shift from vulnerability to passion to risk-taking and finally realism after she has weighed the cost and benefits of her goals, experienced trial and error, and developed knowledge integration and elaboration as things come together in her life.

Nina’s overall character aligns with the value component of the expectancy theory as she exerts energy that directs her toward her goals even if she does fail in the process. Nina exemplifies an individual with a growth mindset as she uses different experiences in her life as connecting sources to navigate who she is and what she wants to accomplish. Nina has intrinsic motivation: the drive to do things of personal interest because they are enjoyable rather than what they can do for you externally through status or rewards. She truly enjoys life's passion for romance and emotions, hence her desire to capture real moments of time that elicit deep shared experiences between people. She identifies and processes what elements of her lived experiences benefit her before she behaves or reacts. She is thorough in her observations. She monitors her emotions and approaches experiences open to the possibility of them being connected to where she wants to go. In her pursuit, she is correct. In each experience, she finds the connectedness of her life journey to lead her to deep love that is costly and hard but fulfilling and inspirational.