Dhonielle Clayton’s short story “Weight” follows two high school seniors, Grace and Marcus, trying to answer the question, “Should we break up before leaving for college?” After hearing glowing reviews, Grace and Marcus decide to go to the Heart Scale Center, a clinic that removes, examines, and weighs the hearts of couples to see who they love the most. The couple has an unconventional past when it comes to love and relationships. Grace’s mother died when she was a teenager, and Marcus’ father cheated on his mother. This has certainly destroyed their view of love. While the couple may have loved each other at one point, Grace and Marcus’ love for each other is not real because of their attitude before the procedure and the results of the procedure. …show more content…
However, his concerns stem from the test possibly showing that his love for Grace is not as strong as hers is for him. While in the waiting room, Marcus reflects on what the results may be. After some time, he concludes that his heart would show love for his mom, sisters, brothers, dad, and Grace. But he worries that the test might show something else. He wonders, “If his curiosity about being with someone else might affect his love for Grace” (Clayton 6). This again shows that their love for each other is not real. Because of the length of their relationship, Marcus begins to fear what he may be missing out on and is curious about being with someone else. While curiosity alone does not reveal that they do not love each other, Marcus admits that this curiosity might affect his love for Grace. The results of the procedure also demonstrate that Grace and Marcus’ love for each other is not real. The test works by showing the names of loved ones imprinted on the heart. Hearticains, medical professionals trained in reading the heart, carefully read and describe each imprint to show who and how much each person loves. Fresh imprints are new loves, scabbed imprints show a dead love, while the depth and size of the imprint shows how heavy the love is. While examining Grace and Marcus’ hearts, the heartian comments, “Female heart has one large scabbed imprint and a small fresh imprint. Seems like a new love is budding. Make a note of it. Male heart has one large imprint. Three quarters of it is scabbed. Semmes like a fading love” (Clayton 11). This clearly shows that their love for each other is not real. Grace has fallen out of love with Marcus and has a new love, whether she wants to admit it or not. Marcus is currently falling out of love with Grace. His curiosity about loving another person supports
A pessimistic view of love doesn’t have to be one of abuse and lying, it can be as simple as just not knowing what love is. Raymond Carver presents a pessimistic view of love in his short story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” with the use of imagery, tone, and characterization. While Carver tells the story of four friends sitting at a table talking about love he allows the reader to evaluate the strength and authenticity of his character’s relationships. Carver does have his characters discuss abuse and lying, but the underlying theme to his pessimism deals more with the unknown things about love or that his characters just don’t understand it.
“ The story of the next dozen years of my life could be made long, but I want to be careful to the officer you only proper handful just enough to describe the course that carried me away from the Port William neighborhood and then twelve years later brought me back again to the proper end of my life, to the love of my life, Mattie Chatham.” Jayber only cared for Mattie, he did everything to be with her. He went to cut Athey hair and shave his facial hair when needed. The love her had for her was unexplainable and unjustifable , she was the person he really want. “ You and I will be forever, just don’t nobody knows.” Jayber had a feeling that Mattie and him will always be married in his head but that was only his imagination. He had always wanted to be with her since they were little kids, he fell in love with her walking home from school having a conversation. Mattie look at Jayber as a friend who she can depend on, but Jayber did not see it that way. “ Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessings, enduring what could not be helped.” This shows that Mattie was in love with Troy even though he did mess up, and she still loves him, but Jayber will always love her. Jayber is so indeterminate in love with her, he went to shave Athey whenever she needs him to, when Athey got sick real bad and could not do it himself. Jayber cared for the people he knew, so he did what they wanted him
Brockmeier’s short story represents a damaged marriage between a husband and a wife simply due to a different set of values and interests. Brockmeier reveals that there is a limit to love; husbands and wives will only go so far to continually show love for each other. Furthermore, he reveals that love can change as everything in this ever changing world does. More importantly, Brockmeier exposes the harshness and truth behind marriage and the detrimental effects on the people in the family that are involved. In the end, loving people forever seems too good to be true as affairs and divorces continually occur in the lives of numerous couples in society. However, Brockmeier encourages couples to face problems head on and to keep moving forward in a relationship. In the end, marriage is not a necessity needed to live life fully.
In Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love,” Mel McGinnis’ occupation as a cardiologist, a physician that mends broken hearts, stands in stark contradiction to his claim to understanding the workings of the heart as it pertains to loving and being loved. The discord between healing his patient’s hearts and his inability to recognize his own malady of heart is exaggerated by how he deals with the relationship of Ed and Terri, as well as that of the elderly accident victims and his ex-wife Marjorie.
In The New Humanities Reader edited by Richard E. Miller and Kurt Spellmeyer. We read about Barbara Fredrickson the author of the book “Love 2.0” copy right (2013). Barbara Fredrickson is a psychologist who show in her research how our supreme emotion affects everything we Feel, Think, Do and become. Barbara also uses her research from her lab to describe her ideas about love. She defines love not as a romance or stable emotion between friends, partners and families, but as a micro-moment between all people even stranger (108). She went farther in her interpretation of love and how the existence of love can improve a person’s mental and physical health (107). Through reading
Both author’s illustrate well, that a lack of love can have a profound effect on the behavior of a person. Whether a person has never experienced love by fortune or by design, the initial introduction of love into
Diaz , Cameron. The Body Book: The Law of Hunger, the Science of Strength, and Other Ways to
Conflicts within the heart can be seen again with Baby, additional to her loss of innocence. She is in an environment hungry for fatherly and motherly figures; Baby is lacking the stability and support that is crucial in a healthy development. Jules is never physically there for Baby, allowing her to go through several foster homes. She admits that Jules is always “gone longer that he said he would be… when a parent splits on you once, they are guaranteed to do it again” (58). Jules is blindly removing himself from Baby’s life and Baby cannot take it anymore. She notices that after Jules went to rehab he “got the unfortunate idea that I could handle myself without him” (52). She is deprived from the closest form of love she can receive and even that is impossible to obtain. Because Jules is hardly ever around, Baby has to learn how to survive into society on her own, using the morals she knows by watching Jules, like Jules’ remedy to life, separating from feeling. Jules and Baby’s mother had Baby at fifteen, and soon after, Baby’s mother passed away. Here again, the most important love, a motherly love, is impossible for Baby to get. It appears that every time she meets an older woman, who shows her some sort of affection, she describes that she feels comforted. After Jules had ripped apart Baby’s only beloved doll (the doll Baby’s mother gave to her), Baby goes for a walk. She passes by her friend Theo’s house and sees his mother in the doorway, wanting to see “if she would try and hurt me that way she had hurt Theo. I’d take her punches just like Theo had” (120). But when Theo’s mother calls Baby over, she appears to be very loving and interested in Baby’s relationship with Theo. She even tells Baby, “Come here, I want to give you a hug. You don’t get enough hugs. I can see that. I’ll give you one of my special teddy bear hugs” (121). Following that, Baby
Love, however, is not the only factor that creates and maintains a relationship. Love has the power to bring people together, but can also break them apart. In addition, it can lead to irrational decisions with terrible consequences. In this short story Margaret Atwood shows the powerful effect that love has on people’s lives. At first glance, the short stories in "Happy Endings" have a common connection: all the characters die.
"Love can affect you so deeply that it reshapes you from the inside out and by doing so alters you destiny for future loving moments" says Fredrickson but she seems to have forgotten that there always two perspectives to any ideology. It is indubitable that the experiences of love play a crucial role in molding an individual, but it is ignorant to say that only love will cause such change. The reality is that not all relationships and encounters are true "micro-moment of love" and those negative experiences also partake in what creates the identity and thought process of an individual. With the knowledge that an individual 's cell play a crucial role in deciding who to have "micro-moments of love"; such negative experience will be associated with the factual, biological notion of love. Thus causing individuals to feel that the negative experience they had to face and deal with were a result of their body and its biology. The idea that their body and brain, essentially unalterable, were capable of causing them pain and heartache, will hinder them from achieving the love and longing for others that Fredrickson describes. The idea that love is functioning by the orders registered by the individual 's body, makes love uncontrollable. Humans in nature are predisposed
Silberstein, L.R, Striegel-Moore, R.H. & Judith, R. (1987). "Feeling Fat. A Woman's Shame." In: Block Lewis, Helen (ed.) The Role of Shame in the Symptom Formation, (pp.89-108). London, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
In the story Say Yes by Tobias Wolff, a marriage is broken overnight by a revelation of the insufficiency of their love in the test. Along with the husband’s wrong response to the “Love Test”, the relationship is dramatically demolished by Ann’s sudden realization of the superficial love of her husband. Even though her husband tries to please Ann with the right answer, her feelings of love has already been shattered by distrust and suspicion. The hypothetical “Love Test” in the story reveals the superficiality of his love, drastically shifting the relationship from intimacy to uncertainty.
Love is a big part of human life and something that everyone has experienced no matter their age, whether that’s romantic, platonic, familial, or material. In fact, it's such a big part of humans that it can be a driving factor in people's decisions. Loving someone or something may cause someone to jump off a bridge, spend money, turn away or take opportunities, and so much more. This is seen in ancient myths like The Odyssey when Penelope refuses other men for 20 years because she believes Odysseus is still alive. Not only is this theme found in ancient texts, it shows up frequently in modern media.
Mickel, E., & Hall, C. (2008). Choosing to Love: The Essentials of Loving (Presents and Problems). International journal of reality therapy, 27(2), 30-34.
Cummings theme of how strong someones love can be appeals to readers minds, because everyone wants that connection with their partner, That undying love for one another. Some people long for a love...