`` Against Love `` By Kipnis

Love should be born and live in fields, just like wild flowers. Love needs to be nurtured by water, with no concern about where and when the next rainfall will take place. Love needs to allow nature to take its course and trust in the sustenance that its surrounding provides. However, love refuses to take the easy path. Instead, love decides to live in kitchens alongside irritated cooks, dirty walls and screaming infants with impatient mothers. Clearly, love would be better off without concerns, growing in a field like an iris, patiently waiting for the next rainfall. However, love chooses to exist in chaotic environments filled with discontent and discord.

How is a human suppose to love? Love is just a statement, a word, a word is just a sound. When you really love something, in loves you back in whatever way it has to love. But what if that love isn't good enough? Doesn’t meet your standards? "‘What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.’ I didn't think that this was true, […] but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue” (Knowles 111).  That is just life, love is something that is always there and needs to be accepted in anyway it can.

Society expects people to fall in love. That is, society expects people to find a life partner, get married, and have children. Those who do not follow the pattern are generally seen as hermits who sit in their houses with multiple forms of pets to keep them company. This burden life throws at human beings growing up, turns into a moral value. People want to find someone that makes them so happy that their heart hurts when they’re not with them. This would be the case if one does actually fall in love. Love can be a wonderful thing. However, sometimes it can be a devastatingly evil form of torture. Even though it is expected to make one feel content and comforted, love can make anyone feel more alone than ever before. Love is presumed to

We live in a society that has increasingly stomped on love, depicting it as cruel, superficial and full of complications. Nowadays it is easy for people to claim that they are in love, even when their actions say otherwise, and it is just as easy to claim that they are not when they really are. Real love is difficult to find and keeping it alive is even harder, especially when one must overcome their own anxieties and uncertainties. This is the main theme present in Russell Banks’ short story “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” as well as in “The Fireman’s Wife,” written by Richard Bausch. These narratives, although similar in some aspects, are completely different types of love stories.

Love exists in the short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” by Alice Munro and in the short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver. in Munro’s short story the plot is that of a mentally ill wife, Fiona, who falls in love with another patient while her husband still tries to hang on to their old love. Her husband eventually wants to have an affair with the wife of the man his wife is having an affair with. Their love changed because of their circumstances due to ill health. Carver’s story discusses the different definitions of love due to the type and quality of relationships; everyone has a different definition. Love also exists all over the world within different environments and cultures. The concept of love depends upon the environment in which it inhabits. Love is dependent on the life of the people in love and it also depends on their current environment. Nature and nurture are also huge factors into the development and process of love. What nature and nurture mean is whether it is due to how the person lives and acts along with their personality compared to whether it’s all in their genetics beforehand. Love is more on the nurture side instead of the nature side of human experience.

Laura Kipnis’s “Against Love”, and Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” ,brings up the issue of what is the definition of love and is love what we think it is. Love has changed in comparison to what it once was, and we now loosely use the term, but what does it truly mean, and why do we buy in to it. Kipnis’s essay develops the idea that this “mature love” is when someone can love and be loved, and she takes the position that this does not happen. Although Kipnis believes mature love is neither a realistic expectation nor a good thing to have, I claim that the idea of mature love is not bogus, because even though it is rare to find, and may even take a few tries, I believe it is possible for people to have this mature love. Unlike Kipnis too, I believe mature love can take on different forms, and doesn’t have to just be so black and white like Kipnis explains it as.

Love is either a fickle crime or an ever-changing satisfaction of desire. For some, it can ruin even the brightest minds, while for others, there is never doubt that it is worth living for. Children grow up with fairy tales and anecdotes of wild love stories, enthusiastic over the prospect of love. Yet has anyone considered the negatives of those dreams?

If society was a person in itself, it would be a criminal. It has deceived human beings into believing that love is supposed to be something that is always beautiful, euphoric and extremely powerful. It pressures individuals into commitment, passion and desire while simultaneously reminding them that an excess of one thing is not good. Society need to make up its mind. As the world knows, love is not simply defined as a group of words; rather, it is many things that are rooted to deep affection. Love presents itself in different shapes, forms and sizes, but what happens to this endearment when it is one-sided? The sole attribute that every individual seek has the potential to destroy most. Unrequited love poisons the character

In our society, falling in love is viewed as an important aspect of one’s life. There are many definitions of love, some being deep affection, an intimate relationship where each person is seen as an equal, or a strong positive emotion towards another person. In Wild Seed, Octavia Butler describes love in terms of selfishness, a need to have someone for personal gain. In doing this, she questions whether love can really be felt in a genuine way. Using the concept of love, and defining it as looking out for one's own self-interest, Butler challenges the current definitions of love.

The love story is one of the oldest and most cherished traditions in any world culture. The prevalence of romantic works throughout history, whether Greek myths, Jane Austen’s dramatic narratives, or today’s dime-a-dozen romantic novels, ultimately encourages us to believe in the power of true love. We identify with the archetypal star-crossed lovers, who combat established convention in order to assert their romance, because we too yearn for our own “happily-ever-afters.” When used in conjunction with reason, love is the highest form of compassion – without it, we could not possibly interact productively with one another or develop as individuals. But when we take a new perspective and examine love as an independent,

The stark divide between love and marriage shown right the way through cannot be comprehended fully by the twenty-first century reader: in today’s society marriage and love are mutually exclusive - you very rarely get one

Watch the classical film Grease and one can understand how relationships function in Western Society. The film tells a story of a boy (Danny) and a girl (Sandy) who falls in love. Through a series of misunderstandings they break up, but still somehow care for each other. Through ballads such as Summer Night’s that are still popular today, the film shows how differently males and females view relationships. Films like Grease are like a mirror, reflecting societal values and how it socializes its members. It makes it clear that in relationships, males are socialized to view relationships as mostly a physical, sexual endeavor, while females view it as a perpetual bond –a deeper connection between the two individuals within a relationship.

In many stories, love is presented as the ultimate solution for everything. It brings happiness from despair and hope from destruction. But in reality, love tricks one’s mind to make reckless decisions. According to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, making decisions based on one’s emotions can lead to pure destruction. This is evident through the words and actions of Romeo, Juliet, and Friar Lawrence.

While people are often able to identify when they feel the emotion love, love itself seems to defy definition.  In her polemic “Against Love”, Laura Kipnis argues that love cannot exist as traditional expressions of love such as marriage, monogamy, and mutuality.  However, in her argument, she defines love incorrectly by equating love to expressions of love. This definition lacks a component essential to understanding the abstract concept of love: emotion. Recognizing love as emotion helps us realize that, contrary to Kipnis’ argument love by nature transcends all expressions of love. Love is subjective and exists in any and all forms. In her argument that love cannot survive as conventional expressions of love, Kipnis ignores the nature of love as emotion in favor of equating love to different expressions of love. Love is a force which exists above expressions of love; a true understanding of love can only come from an assessment of how individuals, not societies, respond to the emotion.

Today, romance is one of the most popular genres to watch on television. Unlike most, romance is a genre where the plot revolves around the love between two main characters as they experience the highs and lows of love. “Common themes that revolve around romantic movies are kissing, love at first sight, tragic love, destructive love, and sentimental love” (Taylor). These themes appear in many historical films and the pattern still continues in modern films as well. Watching romantic movies has a giant negative influence on the viewer's analysis of what love and relationships should really be like. These films give the wrong impression of reality when it comes to dating, marriage, having children, and even how to manage a relationship in