Negative Effects Of Love

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Love, for many, is hard to describe, even for the most experienced writers because it has many different sides. Cleary says that love “helps us to engage more abundantly in life,” which means that love can help someone partake in the joys that life can provide. However, past experiences are the base of how one loves and engages in life, precipitating their actions to be as well. Hence, love in the past can impact present romantic relationships in unpredictable ways. Falling in love may lead people to cheat on their already established relationships. Two writers, Wilde and London, approach the adulterous aspects of love in their works. Wilde writes a tale of two lovers: Isolde, who is the king’s wife, falls in love with Tristan and is emotionally…show more content…
Love can unintentionally draw from emotional wells filled with negative memories. Firestone and Eliot address the negative memories in different ways. Firestone, in his line of work, has seen a man who “felt a flash of anger at his wife when she said she was worried about him riding his bike in an unsafe neighborhood” (2). His wife’s comment came from a loving place and yet he still grew mad. Using an anecdote strengthens Firestone’s credibility, which means that the real-life story of a man reacting angrily towards affection is genuine. He continues, writing, “Ironically, close moments with a partner can activate memories of painful childhood experiences, fears of abandonment and feelings of loneliness from the past” (7), which means that people’s fears and pain from their past affect the way they receive empathy in their present. Firestone’s use of parallel structure by with “fears of abandonment” and “feelings of loneliness” indicates that love can evoke painful feelings from the past. Eliot, on the other hand, writes a poem about a character reflecting on his character’s banal, loveless past. His poem starts by describing the setting, writing that “the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table” (2). Using the simile of comparing the night to a patient lying on a table sets a dark setting and tone for the rest of the poem because the word “patient” implies injury. The diction in his simile…show more content…
Eliot repeats the word “time” (23, 29, 31) in his poem, stating that his character has time for all the things that he wants to do. Since the character does not take advantage of all of his time to ask his love interests out on a date, it is evident that he is a procrastinator. Rejection, which is a negative consequence of love, scares him, most likely having experienced rejection in his past. To emphasize his point, Eliot writes that there is “time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions” (33), which continues with the idea that there is a lot of time in one’s life to change what one wants to do.The use of assonance helps the reader follow Eliot’s writing to further understand how terrified the character is of rejection. Later in the poem, he repeats the phrase: “And how should I presume?” (61,97), which means that he does not even know how to talk to his love interests. He brags that he has known a lot of women (62), and yet he does not have a relationship, so readers can assume that women of his past negatively impacted him romantically. This shows that the negative consequences of love can be so frightening to some because of past experiences with
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