Passionate Love is Closely Tied to Destruction

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Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his book, The Brothers Karamazov, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams,” (“Love”). This quote shows that love is not as sweet as it seems in real life. In order to love, one needs to be ready to suffer and be able to encounter conflicts and trials. Love is an emotion that most of the time is distinguishable into two types: compassionate and passionate love. Passionate love is an intense feeling of love to another person and is sometimes known as infatuation, lovesickness, romantic love or obsessive love. Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist, defines passionate love as a “complex functional whole including appraisals or appreciations, subjective feelings, expressions, patterned physiological processes, action tendencies, and instrumental behaviours”. It comprises powerful feelings and sexual attraction while compassionate love comprises of the feelings of trust, respect and affection. Passionate love can be dreadful and appalling as it can lead to jealousy and unreciprocated love can lead to dejection. This can be seen through the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. In the works examined, passionate love causes the characters to undergo depression, leads to a revenge and causes conflict within families.

Firstly, passionate love causes people to suffer from emotional pain and depression. Passionate love and depression are interconnected with each other. Often times, a person expects his or her lover to reciprocate the person’s love. When the person cannot get love from the one whom they loved or encounters unrequited love, the person may feel very dishearten. Patricia Bass who is a poet wrote in an online magazine about depr...

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