Why Write a Love Story?

The act of getting yourself out into the world is such an exhilarating experience that it brings a high. Even if you are just presenting in front of the class you feel this shaking, a fear of the unknown reactions yet an excitement that your words will impact someone with a feeling. Pouring yourself out onto the reader/listener is an action that you have to ponder over and proceed with slowly, carefully. These are your words; you want your audience to understand exactly what you are going through. This is why Annie Ernaux in "Simple Passion" proceeds with such delicacy, talking about writing in the midst of this passionate love affair. This allows the reader to get a sense of not just the actions going into the story but also the emotions and careful thoughts that we undergo when making life choices. "Simple Passions" explains Ernaux's feelings by both talking about her feelings in the process of the love affair and also by having another dialog about her writing through the book.

Throughout her progress in writing "Simple Passions" Ernaux stops, practically stumbling into an almost apologetic excuse for her catharsis. This periodic stopping not only keeps the reader on their toes but also gives them a moment to analyze her emotions in a non-passionate form. This way any reader, even a sociopath can catch what she is really hinting at in her writing. This is especially prevalent in a particular stop when she explains her writing saying, "Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book, the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail." (Ernaux, 20). In this sentence she explains not only what she is feeling in this passion, but also why she is writing this book in a halting manner. I took from this sentence that she was saying, "bear with me, I'm just trying to get everything exactly right".

Another key to her dialog about writing was her thoughts about individuality. Our perception of individuality is so obscure. Most of us want to stand out and not be a part of the crowd but how do we do that? There are over 7 billion people on this Earth and yet are so sure in our belief that no one else has experienced the same emotions. How many times has a poor psychiatrist probably heard the worlds, "no one understands me"? This obscure perception of individuality continually occurs during Ernaux's writing. She bounces between talking about how different and intense her love affair was to her talking about the women who expressing similar passions and watching movies where she could place herself as one of the characters. She seems to crave this individuality by keeping the secret of her love affair to herself hiding it from the world. Yet when she talks to these passionate women with their desires, she feels a hatred for them and the thought that her passion could be so dull as to be common. "When I continually responded to the other person by saying 'me too, it's the same for me, I did that too.' suddenly seemed futile, removed from the reality of my own passion. Rather, something was lost in these outbursts" (Ernaux, 14). This story is of her having a large outburst which is in its own way telling the audience that they are no different, they can have their passion but it is only the same as everyone else’s. By writing this love story she is telling the world that they are no different. We attempt to maintain our individuality while trying to find a good book with characters that we can relate to. 

Home- Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

"Home"

Alabama Arkansas I do love my Ma and Pa
Not the way that I do love you

Well holy moly me oh my
You’re the apple of my eye
Girl I've never loved one like you

Man o man you're my best friend
I scream it to the nothingness
There ain't nothing that I need

Hot and heavy pumpkin pie
Chocolate candy Jesus Christ
Ain't nothing please me more than you

[Chorus:]
Home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you
Home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you

La la la la
Take me home
Mama I'm coming home

I follow you into the park,
Through the jungle, through the dark
Girl I've never loved one like you

Moats and boats and waterfalls,
Alleyways and payphone calls
I been everywhere with you (that's true)

Laugh until we think we'll die,
Barefoot on a summer night
Never could be sweeter than with you

And in the streets you run afree,
Like it's only you and me,
Geeze, you're something to see.

[Chorus]

La la la la
Take me home
Mama I'm coming home

‒ Jade?
‒ Alexander?
‒ Do you remember that day you fell outta my window?
‒ I sure do ‒ you came jumping right out after me.
‒ Well, you fell on the concrete, nearly broke your ass, and you were bleeding all over the place, I rushed you out to the hospital, you remember that?
‒ Yes, I do.
‒ Well, there's something I never told you about that night.
‒ What didn't you tell me?
‒ Well, while you were sitting in the back seat smoking a cigarette you thought was gonna be your last, I was falling deep, deep in love with you, and I never told you till just now!

[Chorus]

Home, let me come home, home is wherever I'm with you
Our home, yes I'm home, home is when I’m alone with you

Alabama Arkansas I do love my Ma and Pa
Moats and boats and waterfalls,
Alleyways and payphone calls

Home is when I'm alone with you!
Home is when I’m alone with you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjFaenf1T-Y
This song speaks to me because it talks about the kind of love that I want in my life. I want to be happy and to have a relaxed, comfortable, feeling around him. Just two best friends having the time of their lives together. Also the big theme of the song is about how home is somewhere that you just get to be with your love, enjoy each other’s company without any negativity influencing you. It’s really important to not let the negative moments get to you because they can really destroy you. Even in the most negative moments of life, like when someone is possibly dying, a silver lining should be seen. These negative moments can have huge impacts in your life. If you look through life with a negative aspect then you will take away nothing but hurt and anger. However, you can also choose to look at life and your experiences as something that is positive. The positivity can allow you to make it something that will bring the two of you closer than ever.

I've moved 12 different times causing the people around me to be made up of my home instead of the traditional four walls and a roof. Therefore, when I think of going home I think of seeing the people I love, especially those who I hold a romantic love for. This song also reminds me of my boyfriend because I'm continuously having fun with him. We are both pretty lame and don't go out clubbing or to parties. Yet growing up in Maine together we were able to do other crazy romantic things that this song reminds me of, such as running around in the woods at night and laughing at terrible jokes together.

Living and Adrenaline

 Through evolution our body has told us to run away from what we are scared of. With this brain setting we have built up the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, also known as the fight or flight response. Through human history we have learned that we need to run from the things that scare us or we are going to die. The human who is the jumpiest is going to survive longer and pass on more of these "run away" genes. However, we have gotten to this point in history where we finally feel comfortable. Not just the "I have air conditioning" comfortable but a good feeling knowing that you are probably going to survive the day. With this finally comfortable feeling we no longer need to run away from our emotions but we to try to figure out the cause of our fright.

During the time when we were unsure whether we were going to live to see the sun set again the definition of what it meant to live would have been to survive long enough to reproduce. Now that we are at a time where we can pretty much reproduce all over the place, reproduction is not the main thing we have to be concerned about. We are able to widen the definition of what it means to live. To live usually means gaining as much pleasure out of life as possible which is a hard thing to do when pleasure is such a subjective thing and hard to accomplish; especially since everyone feels that they know what would make you the happiest.

I got intrigued by what it means to live while reading The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa. One of the characters hears the story of the main character Ricardo with The Bad Girl. Afterwards she says, "what a life" and several other phrases that make it seem that she thinks that The Bad Girl knows how to live, while she has been incompetent at forming such an existence that is as admirable. It bothered me the most that she envied The Bad Girl's life after she knew all about her strange lovers and how she practically man hopped her way around the world. To Elena, that is the life she wishes she could have. Maybe it's merely the fact that we want what we can't have. Since Elena had a stable life with a husband and a child she is not likely going to go out and get a bunch of lovers. She would be scared of that prospect and that emotion intrigues her.

It intrigues us to see people who face their fears since we still have that sympathetic nervous system telling us to run away. We envy them which is why we watch horror movies trying to scare ourselves into being brave. We watch the movies to prepare ourselves for the worst, hoping that if we were ever put in such a situation we would stand and fight, not run and hide. The Bad Girl faced her fears with her Japanese lover but all it got her was major tissue damage in her orifices. The sympathetic nervous system released the adrenaline when she was with him and it heightened her senses and reactions. She enjoyed that scared feeling that many people would run away from. Though I admire her dedication to pleasure, I feel that when it comes at such a price, you are looking too hard. Excitement can be forced from pain but sometimes the stakes are too high. Our evolution has failed us in some occurrences such as in The Bad Girl's case. We need that adrenaline to survive and so it has been made pleasurable to feel so that it can occur readily. Yet her pleasure was mixed up in a harmful desire, creating a situation that was dangerous for her, but pleasurable in its danger. She should have started running as soon as she felt the hurt occurring but because we are now so comfortable in life we are losing our sense of danger.

Even after The Bad Girl recovers from her injuries she refuses to live a comfortable life. The desire to feel that addictive pleasurable sensations that become so heightened with adrenaline is too much for her. She refuses to live what she deems a normal life and would rather die than be comfortable in her pleasures. She even tells Ricardo that she will make sure that he is never comfortable around her so that he will feel that heightened sensation around her. Though Ricardo cares dearly for his comfortable life, he would rather be uncomfortable with her than have any other life.

The aspirations and desires you have seem to correlate with what you think it means to live. We can all breathe and our hearts are all designed to pump until the electrical impulses stop. Yet, living is something that we seem to fail at quite often. We enter each day with a sort of trepidation towards the unknown that is about to occur. We see chances, encounters, and dreams pass us by. We do things to better our lives such as go to school, work hard, and build acquaintances. How successful are we really at making our lives the best possible? Why do we not just reach out and take all of the chances we have? But then, even if we did maybe that wouldn't lead to the life that we want anyways. Maybe the ability to be comfortable with your life is something to strive for. We are scared of the unknown, but there is usually a good reason.

Passion: The Poison and Savior of Love

We fall into love expecting an eternity of happiness and rainbows only to find that true love is something hidden in the folds of this passion. When the passion has resolved into a comfortableness without an extreme burning passion, and you still want to be with that person, you are in love. So many people mistake this extreme passionate love for the lasting love. The story is told over and over again from the recently ex-boyfriend/girlfriend talking about how they had to break up because they had become different people. The truth is that you have not become different people, the only difference that has occurred in your relationship is that you have finally accepted who that person really is leading to the realization that you don’t actually like them as a person.  

While reading the book The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa I saw a rare look at a woman who knew that when you are under the influence of love for too long you will start to learn about a person which will lead in a lack of passion. Lilly was only looking for passion she thought that she had no need of love, it could not provide her with riches or even a comfortable life. She attempted to tell the main character Ricardo of this phenomenon by saying, "If instead of sending me to Cuba that time you had let me stay with you here, in Paris, how long would we have lasted Ricardo?" after he misunderstands and tells her how they would have had a long happy life together she replies. "How naïve you are, what a dreamer." (Llosa, 57-58). Although in the book this character plays a heartless femme fetal, she knows how to play the game of love. This understanding of passion and love allows her to be able to manipulate men so that she gets what she wants. To marry her first rich husband she uses the influence of one of her lovers to get her out of Cuba and military training, paving the way for the marriage. Later when she leaves the husband for a different lover she steals his entire band account. Even after she has completely ruined him this poor man still admits that he would have given it to her if she had just asked

In that one sentence you can see that she was telling him that their passion would have dwindled quickly. The larger the passions the quicker the love dies out and this is because with this intense passion comes obsession. He had so much love for her that he devoted his entire life to her whenever they were together. While this is romantic, it is impractical for creating a sustaining love. With all of his time, energy, and money devoted all at once he would have soon grown tired of her and not have held the passion with such an obsessive nature. She flames his love by slowly destroying him when they are together and apart. She goes to great lengths to make her seem unreachable when she is always just around the corner waiting for him. She shows this by going as far as having a husband. Yet, during that time she still sleeps with Ricardo, holding onto him loosely.

In my own relationship I have undergone the passion and had it die down to a lasting love. Possibly the cause of this is because we have never been the primary focus of each other. We have always put schooling first which is what has driven us apart for all of these years. The closest we have ever lived to each other was an hour away and for three of the six years that we have been together he has been five hours away. But the fact is that we have spent a lot of time together and I can confidently say that I now know who he is and I still like him for that. In fact, I love him for that. Although it would be a lie to say that I'm mad with desire over him, it would also be a lie to say that I'm not in love with him.

Love is one of those rare things that is the both the antidote to its own poison and its poison to its own antidote. This is a fact that Lilly in The Bad Girl knows too well. Time and time again we see people falling for this feeling of love. Even if we can't find love we look for it in other sources such as food and on-line dating. These other passions serve as distractions that we pour ourselves into until we find our loves. Lilly used parks, art, and museums to distract Ricardo when they were together. By going to these villas she was able to keep him from stewing in his passions and stretching it out so that it lasted. Eventually when the parks and museums got to become less fun she would leave him abruptly. This surprise departure would leave him startled and wishing for her so that she knew she could go back to him if she ever wanted to.

Just as Ricardo felt a loneliness when he was without his Lilly, we feel incompetent, inept, and unlovable if we cannot find this love. But to what avail do we search for it for. Usually, at the end of the day we end up hurt. We make ourselves believe that this love is an antidote to our problems. It will allow us to be forever happy and content with ourselves. Yet once we go through this phase of passion where we can't get enough of this person we eventually find that this object of our desire is only a human being. If we could fall in love with completely obscure and perfect things such as, angles and art forms; really anything that would obtain its perfection forever then maybe we could love passionately, forever. But even with perfection we grow bored. We are imperfect humans who fall in love with other imperfect humans. It is a recipe that in most cases ends in only hurt and heart ache. We learn about the person and then either grow bored or dislike that this other person has emotions that do not involve pleasuring us and, more often than not, annoy us.