What is Love Essay Example for Free

What is Love Essay What is Love? Does anyone really know the meaning of the word? Does it have a different meaning to different people? In Kipnis’s essay â€Å"Love Labors†, Laura Kipnis touches on many different aspects of love. This is a touchy subject simply because love brings out many different opinions and beliefs. Kipnis argues over the fact that in order to have a good relationship and love someone people have to be able to meet certain requirements, which are mutuality, communication, and advanced intimacy. Love is a complicated topic, in my opinion there are two types of love. The first type is when people can tell their friends or their family members that they love them. This type of love is the kind of love where everybody knows their supper close with one another, and will do anything for each another. The second type of love is the love that one person has between another human being, this special someone could be that other human beings soul mate. This type of love is where one person can tell their significant partner anything they want in the world, because they know that they can trust them to be straight up with them. When I was reading her essay I was always finding myself being confused when reading about how she felt about things for example one of her bigger topics adultery. I was really confused when she stated â€Å"Yes, adulterers: playing around, breaking vows, causing havoc. Or†¦ maybe not just playing around? † (Kipnis 399) I really had no idea what the point is that she is trying to get across when talking about adultery. It was sentences like this one that made her essay really confusing and hard to understand. On the other hand my interpretation of what I read was that this essay is about loves meaning, the different aspects of love and how you have to work to keep love alive. In one of Kipnis’s other essays â€Å"Against Love† Kipnis suggests, â€Å"Love is, as we know, a mysterious and controlling force. It has vast power over our thoughts and life decisions. It demands our loyalty, and we, in return freely comply† (Nytimes. com). I think this is the best way to explain love. When there is someone that you really care for, you do and say things that you never imagine yourself doing. I think this is the main purpose of love and what everyone should feel. Love is not something you just stumble upon. It is something that grows on you with time. I believe that if you love someone your willing to go out of your way and do extraordinary things for this person. I do not believe it would be a random person in front of you at the supermarket that you will do those types of things for, because you need to have a deep feeling and connection to this person. In this essay, something else Kipnis said stood out to me. â€Å"But passion must not be allowed to die! † (nytimes. com). I believe that if there is passion, you should never let it die. Passion is a strong, uncontrollable emotion that you have for another person. It is not something that you can stop or pretend to share with someone. Love can and will make you feel as if you are nothing without the other half. The cultural artifact that I chose to use for this analysis is No Strings Attached directed by Ivan Reitman. The movie is based off of two characters one that is portrayed by Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman plays the other character. The movie is about a guy and a girl who are trying to be friends with benefits. They are pretty much friends that use each other for sex and they made a pact to not fall in love. However, by the end of the movie they both realize that they do truly love each other. â€Å"We don’t pick who we fall in love with and it never happens like it should. † (Alvin, No strings attached) You can’t just force yourself to fall in love with somebody it just kind of happens. The doctor that she dated through out the movie seemed like the perfect guy for her, but she wasn’t truly in love with him. Adam never gave up on her and you see that at the end of the movie. No matter how you go about being friends with benefits at some point some is going to catch feelings for the other or potentially fall in love with them. With that being said one of the two people participating in this act is going to end up getting hurt. In the movie No Strings attached Adams falls in love with Emma when she breaks his heart by telling him she can’t do this anymore. Both characters had a different part in the movie, No Strings Attached. In Kipnis’s essay Love Labors she talks about, â€Å"how domestic life has become such a chore that staying at the office is more relaxing†. (Kipnis 395) Natalie Portman’s character is the uptight person in their so-called relationship she is more worried about her work than she is worried about having a relationship. She finds her work more relaxing than actually having to put work in to something else. She is also in control over their whole friends with benefits relationship. On the other hand Ashton Kutchers character plays the role of being more easy-going and the ladies man. Most times when adultery comes up we think that its no big deal that were just messing around or that were just playing around with one another, when in all reality adultery is a lot more serious than we really think it is. In todays society we call it friends with benefits, in the movie no strings attached they plan to be friends with benefits not thinking their going to catch feelings for one another due to the fact that we think were just playing around with one another even though we don’t realized the fact that some point the relationship will start to get serious, and we wont just be playing around. When two people want to have a relationship where it deals with them only messing around and thinking that by playing around they wont think that their relationship will start to get serious and be something more than just sleeping with each other. Society today shows us that people who want to have a relationship where they are just messing around with each other and don’t have any clue that one day things will start to get serious between both people, because they are too busy having fun and just messing around with one another and don’t realize that they will start to build feelings for one another while they continue to have a friends with benefits relationship. A few terms that Kipnis would use in her analysis would have to be dedication, appreciation, and lust. In my mind, Kipnis would think that Adam and Emma are meant to be together, that Emma had to move on and find a different guy, for Emma to really realize how she felt about Adam and how he is the right guy for her. Kipnis would say that to build a strong relationship with Adam, Emma would need to realize what he really meant to her. When Emma dates the doctor it helps her realize that Adam is the one. When Kipnis talks about â€Å"the millions of images of love struck couples looming over us from movie screens, televisions, billboards, magazines, incessantly strong-aiming us onboard the love train. † (Kipnis 402) I feel as though love is promising us that one day we will find that one special someone that we will spend the rest of our lives with, but before we can spend the rest of our lives with that special someone we first have to go through a struggle of loss. We will loose that special someone only for a moment and in that moment we will have to find the strength to over come the adversity through out the struggle we inherit. This will show us a path that we will have to take in order to be with the one we love the most, but there will be many or maybe even just one struggle along the way that we will have to over come. This is how love will â€Å"Strong-arm us† (Kipnis 402) it will make us stronger as people and as couples. In my mind some of the dangers of resisting love are that mostly because people don’t want to get hurt, or they don’t want to marry someone and then have their marriage end in divorce. So many people are worried about divorcing their significant other right after they get married, and to me that’s why I think people try and resist love. In my mind the love that this society is trying to help create is a type of love that is more than just seeing two people get married, then having kids and watching their kids grow up and begin to have families of their own.