Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Degradation of Love

Love has lost much of its magnitude with humanity over our existence. The Greeks had drastically different views on love than we do now, and much of that can be attributed to how we have misconstrued the vision of love. Nowadays love is viewed more as a feeling and is most comparable to simply caring for someone as opposed to actually having that connection and foundation that love is supposed to have.

So often we tell our boyfriends and girlfriends that we "love" them. This is not completely false. The "love" that we feel when we say this is an immature one, and it is based on naive and young emotions. However, we believe it to be "true love" or something of the sort. We are so mistaken over love because of what we want to view it as and how the media portrays it. The media and the sort show love as something someone can fall in and out of. They, along with many naive and misinformed and misguided people, see love as merely an emotion and nothing less. They want to base love on a feeling as opposed to a connection and a commitment. So often marriages that are based upon "love" fail because the couple does not grasp what love really is; the commitment is not truly there. They believe their "love" will work everything out in the end, but they fail to realize that their love is not the deep connection it needs to be in order for that logic to even make sense in the first place.

Love is also used a simple space saver nowadays. Instead of simply saying, "I really enjoy my new car," or, "I like this song," we have reduced love to mere enjoyment or likeness. "I love my car!" is evidence that love has really lost its meaning among our people. This does not mean that the phrase loses any significance when uttered to a family member or someone you truly love, but it does show how far we have degraded love. Do you love your car like a brother, like your country/countrymen, or (God forbid) erotically? Those would be the types of love the Greeks would associate such a phrase with, and they would be appalled to see how we used that word now.

I am not saying we need to revert back to the way the Greeks lived and functioned. Their society was so drastically different than ours, and ours has its pros and cons such as theirs did. We have become a more integrated society and one more willing to accept equality among all its members. I merely agree with how they viewed love as opposed to how we do. Love meant so much more then, and I truly wish we could grasp even a portion of what love meant back then. Love is used as an excuse and a way to mend mistakes and broken relationships in our society. Love should be so much more than that.

There is so much more I have to say about this subject, but this is a blog, not a novel or any sort of literary work. I did write a poem that dealt with this too, but it was even shorter and I could not grasp fully what I meant to say in it either. I simply mean to state that love is not what it once was, and it is truly saddening.

This post is in honor of Stephen Loope, a courageous man that has endured so much pain in his life over the past year. May God watch over you, and may everyone that truly loves you comfort you.

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