This was a paper I did in response to three stories on love a couple of semesters back....
In reading throughout the various stories devoted (teehee) to love including "How to Talk to a Hunter," "the Experience," and " Happy Endings," the one predominant aspect of each story was the negative, cynical way of looking at love the stories take. Now I am not the world's greatest optomist nor am I some Cassonova who values love as sacred but I think that love is really getting the bad end of the stick. Now I am aware that in the literature we should discuss the reality of the work as opposed to true reality but literature is derived from life and the treatments effectively mimic life enough to discuss love in a real life sense. In other word, the worlds of literature are close enough in each of these stories what love may be discussed outside of the stories continuum. I would attempt to restate that but I would confuse myself. THe point is that I feel personally more optomistic about love than all of these authors and is that just something that's wrong with me?
In "the Experience" we see an embittered woman who found herself trapped in relationships that forced her to conform to standards that she felt were too limiting( I have to agree with her on that one) and that she found herself transforming into more of the person she wanted to be with each successive relationship until finally she presumably found the one she agreed with and was happy. Here's my problem with this: Was it love that kept her captive in her first relationships and failed her or was it the ideals of the society at the time and the unwavering insistence that men were in control and women should just shut up and do what they are told? I have a hard time believing that is was a problem with love as opposed to mismatching and faulty ideals. It just doesn't seem like love is really present when it shares company with the volume of hate present in the author during her first marriages. I could be way off base here but it seems like the people involved were not really in a love relationship as much as a comfortable misery situation. This is one in which life is miserable under present conditions but it would be too much trouble to do anything about it until things have gone too far.
"How to Talk to a Hunter" supports the above ideas nicely. In this story we have a woman who knows for sure her boyfriend is cheating but won't leave him despite her friends' insistence that she should break it off. Is this love that makes her stay? Hell no, its co-dependence. She won't leave him because she gets some form of validation from him, and would rather stay and where she is than brave the pain and uncertainty of leaving. I do have the disticnt impression that she has almost had enough, but still love seems to be getting the rap for something that it has nothing to do with. When people get into the a relationship and it goes sour, is it realistic that love is to blame, that there is something in love that is inherently faulty? I don't think so, I think if things go wrong it is more likely some problem with the individuals' compatibility than love being out to get them.
"Happy Endings" really brings out, I think, more of the accountability factor than the other works. "Happy Endings" is much more pragmatic in its assertion that happiness is subjective and love really depends on the circumstances. One example of this is the bizarre third section with John infatuated with Mary, Mary infatuated with James and James simply doesn't give a shit. The only people who ended up in any amount of real love were John's widow and that guy carl(after John killed himself, mary and James). THe point is that infatuation is different from love in basic principle.An entirely different set of emotions control it. Love is mostly a pure feeling of happiness and contentment whereas infatuation is the need to have something.
It is, of course, easy to prattle on about this when my definition of love is unstated and could be totally different than the definitions used in the stories but I think that is mainly because of humans' basic unwillingness to take responsibility for something else, especially when that something else is an intangible ill defined word that means something different to everyone. The point I am attempting(quite clumsily I fear)to get at is that love is so often used as a scapegoat to alleviate stress and personal responsibility that comes from a failed relationship. It is a cop out to blame it all on love because love is not a tangible object but rather a feeling or a notion. While it is possible to change that feeling or notion, it is ignorant to assume that notion changes itself against your will. It is time for people to leave love alone and look at the real issues and difficulties namely themselves.
Well that is the more recent one...email if you want to.
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