Essay About Love in The Road Less Traveled

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The Element of Love in The Road Less Traveled

Scott Peck expresses his unusual perspective of love in his work, The Road Less Traveled. Peck's view of love was a correction to what he thought everyone else thought love was. This paper will be an explanation of Peck's beliefs about love, a contrasting view on love, and my personal knowledge of Peck's beliefs.

Peck had a very pessimistic and, at times, a contradicting view of what is believed to be "love" and introduced that in his section on the definition of love. Peck (1978) believed "Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words"(page 81). Later on in that same page Peck offers a definition of love as being "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's personal growth"(page 81). He also breaks down his definition into five comments: First- The definition has a goal or a purpose, Second- The definition given is a circular process, Third- The definition includes self-love as love for the other, Fourth- The definition implies effort, and Fifth- The definition implies a "will" to do something rather than just a desire. Peck believes that lots of suffering can be avoided if a person would take the time out to do away with the common misconceptions of love and came to a more precise meaning of love. Peck's section called "The Myth of Romantic Love" delves deeper into why he believes that people do not fully understand the meaning of true love. Peck says, "...the experience of falling in love probably must have as one of its characteristics the illusion that the experience will last forever"(page 91). He blames our mentality of this "fairy tale" love on society. In this section Peck also discusses the myth that there is one man for every one woman and vice versa. When a couple falls out of love, "...then it is clear that a dreadful mistake was made, we misread the stars, we did not hook up with our one and only perfect match, what we thought was love was not real or "true" love, and nothing can be done about the situation except to live unhappily ever after or get divorced" (page 91). Peck believes that couples that live by this type of mentality prize togetherness and see it as a sign of a healthy marriage but in actuality it is not.

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