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Medea & Romeo and Juliet

Crazy Love 

Essay Example

 

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          Love does not make you do irrational things. People can get caught up in love and everything seems idyllic but they're really just replacing their own reality with what they want to see. When you cannot imagine arguments or hard times you are not in love. When you have stayed a relationship longer than you should that is not love, it is blindness and irrational. True love is very rational. True love is hard and exhausting. So often, especially in young love, once the couple breaks up, reality sets in. They find they were never in love at all. After you break up you find they repulse you. You wonder why you would have ever degraded yourself in such a way. You notice how ordinary they are. You find that your mind can play tricks on you and make you believe that you're in love but it is simply an excuse to leave reality for a little while. There are many literary examples of people believing that they are in love later to find out that they were acting irresponsibly and irrationally. True love is the most rational and sensible thing in the world. When people act irrationally and blame it on love it is usually immaturity, stupidity or madness.

            Medea, the play, is a perfect example of love not making you do irrational things. In the play Medea, angry with her husband Jason for marrying another woman, kills her husband's new wife, her father, and both of her own children. Love did not make Medea irrational in any way. Medea is the most rational person in this play. Her lust for revenge and her hatred for Jason was so fierce that she made a plan and then followed through with it. Her goal was to hurt Jason and Medea felt that her revenge would not be complete if her children were left to live. By the end of the play Jason is destroyed completely. She was being completely rational by killing her children and not allowing her love for them to get in the way of her revenge. She was making a decisive stand against Jason and acted courageously. If she had simply killed Jason his suffering would have been over and she would not have been able to achieve complete satisfaction of his utter destruction. If she were acting irrationally she would not have had an exit plan after murdering four people. She knew that she had a waiting flying chariot to take her to safety. Medea is a stone cold murderer, but she is not irrational.

            Romeo and Juliet is another perfect example of love not making you do irrational things. Romeo is not in love in this play nor is Juliet. They are just immature children playing around with the idea of love. There are so many flowery love quotes from Romeo in this play the only problem with them is that only about half of them for Juliet. Proof that Romeo is flighty and immature is his complete and other love for another woman long before Juliet stood on the balcony. By long before of course I mean one day. All of his abstract language comparing love to a million things suggest that maybe Romeo knows more about love from books then actually being in love in real life. Romeo forgets all about his love for Rosaline the exact second he sees Juliet. Which would make one think that he was never really in love with Rosaline to begin with. Wouldn't this also mean that Romeo's desire for Juliet is nothing more than meaningless infatuation? When Romeo and Juliet talk for the first time at the Capulet ball Romeo uses some of his best pickup lines. He touches Juliet's hands and lips and said it was a religious experience. The only problem with his deep religious experience is that we have heard it before, he used to say the same kind of stuff about Rosaline. Romeo is a child and in this book he acts like one. He is not crazy because of love he is not in love with anything at all except for maybe being in love. No actual human girl has his interest more than a week.

            Cyrano de Bergerac is another good example of love not making you do irrational things. Cyrano, Christian and  Comte de Guiche all believe that they are in “love’ with Roxane, yet none of them are. All of them act irrationally in their interactions with her, Cyrano can't even talk to her and has to hide behind bushes to catch a glimpse of her, that's not love. Christian doesn't own the intellectual capacity to speak with her. Christian is immature and just believes she is beautiful, and that is not love. Comte de Guiche sends the other two men to battle to get them out of the way. Which is incredibly rational. What better way to get rid of your amorous rivals, but it is not love. Poor Roxane believes that she's in love, but since everybody is lying to her she doesn't have enough information to know if any of her feelings are true. All of the men in this play act irrationally, but none of them act irrationally because of love.

            In the real world there are many examples of people blaming their irrational behavior on love. One Hundred percent of the time it is just an excuse. A woman named Kelly Summers posted videos on YouTube after she found out her boyfriend had a long-term girlfriend. Summers was devastated and posted 62 videos on YouTube pouring her heart out and begging him to come back to her. Summers was eventually reunited with her Romeo who saw the videos and took her back. Love didn't make her do crazy things, her need for attention and maybe a touch of insanity did. Is there a single doubt in your mind that this couple will be broken up any time now? Putting yourself on public display doesn't mean that you're in love, it means she wanted her 15 minutes of fame more than she wanted her next breath. She could also use a good psychotherapist. She cannot possibly think the dirtbag who was cheating on his girlfriend with her wouldn't turn around and do the exact same thing to her down the road. Her goal was achieved through these moronic videos. She got to be the martyr saying how “wronged” she was. The feedback she got from viewers filled the role as “friends” and she got famous for being a basket case. What this woman needs is a 72 hour psych hold. She is crazy, not crazy in love. She is irrational and delusional, but not in love.

            Another real-world example is one of the most extreme crazy for love stories in history. England's King Henry VIII first noticed Anne Boleyn in the 1520s and he pursued her for years. He wanted to annul his first marriage to be with Anne instead. The Pope refused so Henry assumed the role of Supreme Head of the Church of England and married Anne. He had his marriage to Catherine annulled and he got excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Henry and Anne got married and she gave birth to Elizabeth the future Queen of England. Henry was mad that Elizabeth was not a boy so they kept trying to have more kids but he never ended up getting a son. King Henry became interested in Jane Seymour the maid. King Henry was never really in love with Anne. If he had truly loved her he would've stuck with her through thick and thin. Henry trumped up charges of adultery, incest and treason against Anne and had her beheaded in 1536. Love did not make Henry VIII murder his wife, bloodlust and insanity did.

 

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