Saturday, May 5, 2012
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Thursday, November 20, 2008
What is love?
My big question is What Is Love? This may seem like a stereotypical question, but that only proves how important its definition is to humanity.
I chose this question because my parents have the most turbulent relationship I've witnessed between a married couple, and yet they manage to stay together. Their problems generally start small and escalate until they wear on each other constantly. Even a conversation about the weather can turn into a subtle put-down match. Since they make each other thoroughly unhappy, I wonder if they might be better off in a state of perpetual dating rather than a conventional marriage. But is the culmination of love happiness? My parents' experiences seem to conclude that love is not the ultimate happiness, but a constant struggle for coexistence. Still, my parents' relationship provides more questions than answers.
My classmates raise this question, notably Shakespeare and AP U.S. History. In Shakespeare, we read Othello and watched Much Ado About Nothing, which bring up the Freudian concept of psychic impotence where one cannot love someone if he also lusts after her and jealous love, as well as the correlation between hatred and love. In AP U.S. History we often debated whether colonial couples, who marry for economic stability rather than romantic reasons, love each other. If they do love each other, we decided, their love comes from caring for each other and for the family rather than from romantic attraction. These interpretations still leave me uncertain of the difference between love and the effects of love.
Some movies I have seen refute the idea that love is culturally defined. In The Duchess, a woman who believes in romantic love marries a man who pays more attention to his dogs than he does to her, and who remains emotionally detached from even those closest to him. He cheats on his wife openly, inviting his favorite whore who also used to be his wife's best friend before she slept with him in order to see her children again, and speaks with her only about producing a male heir, yet he claims he loves his wife, as he understands love. His assertion supports the idea that love is personally, rather than culturally defined. After all, how can a sociopath who cannot feel emotion because of a problem with his or her brain understand emotional love? But does love need to be emotional to be real?
A romance between a warlord and his servant in the anime series Rurouni Kenshin also defies normal classifications of love. The servant displays her love to the warlord by serving him no matter how cruel or immoral his decisions. When the hero accidentally kills the servant when she gets in the way of his attack on the warlord, the hero berates the warlord, calling him a selfish pig for allowing his love to die for him. The warlord calls the hero an idiot who should not presume to understand his servant. She says that dying for the warlord was the happiest moment of her life because she served him the best out of all the warlord's servants. Sometimes I forget that immoral people can fall in love too, and that love can be expressed in more ways than simple marriage.
When people discuss love, most agree that love ends in monogamy, but the webcomic Flipside refutes this idea. A nymphomaniac jester falls in love with an aspiring knight, but their beliefs about monogamy differ greatly. The jester believes being a monogamous person is against her nature and against her belief in the importance of sexual freedom, but she loves the knight deeply, and attempts to change her ways to keep from hurting the knight. The jester does hurt herself by doing this, however, and wishes that the knight would allow an open relationship between the two of them so she could live up to her own philosophy.
I chose this question because my parents have the most turbulent relationship I've witnessed between a married couple, and yet they manage to stay together. Their problems generally start small and escalate until they wear on each other constantly. Even a conversation about the weather can turn into a subtle put-down match. Since they make each other thoroughly unhappy, I wonder if they might be better off in a state of perpetual dating rather than a conventional marriage. But is the culmination of love happiness? My parents' experiences seem to conclude that love is not the ultimate happiness, but a constant struggle for coexistence. Still, my parents' relationship provides more questions than answers.
My classmates raise this question, notably Shakespeare and AP U.S. History. In Shakespeare, we read Othello and watched Much Ado About Nothing, which bring up the Freudian concept of psychic impotence where one cannot love someone if he also lusts after her and jealous love, as well as the correlation between hatred and love. In AP U.S. History we often debated whether colonial couples, who marry for economic stability rather than romantic reasons, love each other. If they do love each other, we decided, their love comes from caring for each other and for the family rather than from romantic attraction. These interpretations still leave me uncertain of the difference between love and the effects of love.
Some movies I have seen refute the idea that love is culturally defined. In The Duchess, a woman who believes in romantic love marries a man who pays more attention to his dogs than he does to her, and who remains emotionally detached from even those closest to him. He cheats on his wife openly, inviting his favorite whore who also used to be his wife's best friend before she slept with him in order to see her children again, and speaks with her only about producing a male heir, yet he claims he loves his wife, as he understands love. His assertion supports the idea that love is personally, rather than culturally defined. After all, how can a sociopath who cannot feel emotion because of a problem with his or her brain understand emotional love? But does love need to be emotional to be real?
A romance between a warlord and his servant in the anime series Rurouni Kenshin also defies normal classifications of love. The servant displays her love to the warlord by serving him no matter how cruel or immoral his decisions. When the hero accidentally kills the servant when she gets in the way of his attack on the warlord, the hero berates the warlord, calling him a selfish pig for allowing his love to die for him. The warlord calls the hero an idiot who should not presume to understand his servant. She says that dying for the warlord was the happiest moment of her life because she served him the best out of all the warlord's servants. Sometimes I forget that immoral people can fall in love too, and that love can be expressed in more ways than simple marriage.
When people discuss love, most agree that love ends in monogamy, but the webcomic Flipside refutes this idea. A nymphomaniac jester falls in love with an aspiring knight, but their beliefs about monogamy differ greatly. The jester believes being a monogamous person is against her nature and against her belief in the importance of sexual freedom, but she loves the knight deeply, and attempts to change her ways to keep from hurting the knight. The jester does hurt herself by doing this, however, and wishes that the knight would allow an open relationship between the two of them so she could live up to her own philosophy.
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