Literature doomed love LITERATURE&PHILOSOPHY

I have posited the idea in a debate, with my friend who studies Classics at Cambridge University, that literature is what put an end to love with its idealisations and romanticisms. Birthing, what is arguably, unrealistic expectations that will never materialise. To which my friend responded: no, no 'literature is the only place love exists!'.

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I turn to the academic Simon Blackburn, author of 'think', who in the 2017's Oxford union moved to portray love as a ‘calamity'. He said that love is an ‘ideal’.' ideals are only ideals because they are hard to achieve and obtain, that is why they are our ideals and our goals. people have ideals weighs' , ideal grades, ideal incomes. All the examples given 'require sacrifice, but in love we make our sacrifices based on the perceived value of the object of our adoration, hence people make sacrifices far too grand for its actual worth' . Romeo and Juliet sacrificed their lives and Othello and Desdemona did so as well. Literature has brainwashed us into thinking love is worth everything we have, that love should be all-consuming and that we should only consider ourselves to be in love if we are, quite frankly, barking mad ( or in the case of Romeo and Juliet : suicidal). I believe that is ‘eros’, the Greeks warned us against eros , literature is the breading ground for this romantic insanity.

An emotion that clouds our better judgement , our reasoning and rationality is not love.

Literature portals a very deadly concoction of, attachment issues, trust issues, and an abyss of characters that are unable to control their action due to "being in love". What literature portrays is a magnified, convoluted and an elaborate version of love, a twisted type of love, and canonical romance literature’s victims are led to believe that he/she is only "in love" when he/she has feelings so intense they would take a bullet for the other. Judging our relationships against what story books describe, that a partner that would die for us, a lover who would lose all their fortune for us , a man/women/other who would betray his/her/its family for our hand is in" real love”, is poisonous to marriages and may just be one of the resigns for so many divorces. Reality simply cannot compete against such ideals fantasies. Because we are told that these iconic stories such as "Othello's" are the pinnacle of love, we are tragically under the illusion that love is this madness that deprives all humans of their logic.

Having studied literature for a number of years now I can safely say that the most great loves in literature end with death! Therefore, literature has doomed love as young lovers expect the other to be willing to given the ultimate sacrifice for them and believe themselves not to be in love until their partner is willing to do that for them. The reality of love is much more serene and calm, people do not lose all reasoning and rationality and lovers don't die...

Literature created another love entirely, Mania, the writers of such famous love stories wrote this diabolical emotion that cripples that mind, but they only wrote it into existence and hence it only exists in books, on in pages. You will only doom yourself trying to find this manic love in the real world. You will be relentlessly and forever searching, it does not exist here. However many people choose to embark on this journey to find this story book love and here lays before you the reason literature has doomed love: we expect this love that we read in Shakespeare, but this emotion just doesn't exist here in the real world. Fret not though, this is a good thing! thank god that this mentally imbalanced love doesn’t exist here because the love portrayed in literature is dangerous and incompatible with civilised society, we cannot have people left right and centre losing their minds in pursuit of one another, it would lead to chaos and mayhem, it even begins to sound predatory.

If you are looking for this manic love that Romeo and Juliet found in a week ,let me be the one to rip the bandage off and tell you it is only ever found in literature as that emotion was written into a book by a playwright and will always and only live on paper. Really the idea that literature doomed love and love only exist in literature is one and the same, as the love that literature portrays is beautifully damned ( excuse the pun )and only resides there. Society has been put under its spell for decades, making people believe that what it tells us is "love" is the real deal and what we should be looking for, but no more will Shakespeare's Tyranny reign over our love lives ( particularly the tinder’s of millennials) .

By Tissa Sabeti