English 1B

Love: A Synonym for Loneliness?

Being alone in love is the most terrifying emotion there is; it can eat away at your soul until every semblance of the person you once were slowly disappears. Arthur Shnitzler puts it best when he says, "No spectre assails us in as many varied disguises as loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love". The problem with this idea of being lonely in love is that the reason a person in love feels alone is because the love is flawed; either it is not meant to last, or something crucial must be changed in the relationship.

The story of Romeo and Juliet is considered both the most romantic and the most tragic story of all time. If two people are so in love that they would risk everything they have just to be together, how could there be loneliness in that scenario? When love surrounds and envelopes you, shouldn't all past feelings of isolation and uncertainty dissolve in the face of such emotion?
When Romeo and Juliet meet, it can be called nothing but love at first sight, a "fatal attraction". Their love story progresses quite a bit differently than Schnitzler predicts when he says, ""Each loving relationship has three stages...the first in which you are happy with each other when silent; the second in which you are silently bored with each other; and the third in which silence becomes a form that stands between the lovers like an evil enemy""(James 703). While the demise of Juliet and her lover Romeo precludes them from ever getting to step two or three, step one was also never part of the process, most likely because what Romeo and Juliet feel for each other is more childhood infatuation than any kind of mature love. Had fate not led to their untimely deaths, their tumultuous romance most likely would have fizzled out before step two.
The story of two young lovers desperate for each other and ready to sacrifice everything to be together is not new, nor is it original. This is an everyday circumstance because young people are too naive and too self-centered to comprehend anything beyond the here and now.

When Romeo looks upon Juliet on the balcony, he says to himself, "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun" (2.2.2-3). By comparing a teenage girl he just met to something as powerful and permanent as the sun, he is putting her on an impossible pedestal that she can never get off of, and therefore his love for her is not real. With true love comes true understanding, and the only thing that Romeo understands about Juliet is how beautiful she is and how much he wants her. This is Romeo's loneliness disguised as love; he is making a tragic romance out of the need in his young heart to feel something real, and to believe that there is more to life than just living it.

Romeo, like many other young men, searches constantly for that perfect woman who will fulfill his life and erase all feelings of loneliness from it. When the play begins it is not Juliet Romeo is in love with, but another young woman named Rosaline. He describes her as, "O, she is rich in beauty, only poor That when she dies, with beauty dies her store" (1.2.223-224). He is saying she is so beautiful that when she dies beauty will die with her, and so will the beauty she has stored up for her children. This is exactly the way he talks about Juliet, and when he first sees her his fickle heart leads him to exclaim, "Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it, sight, For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night" (1.5.59-60).

When Romeo talks to the Friar about marrying Juliet he is so shocked to hear of Romeo's sudden change of heart from Rosaline to Juliet he says, "Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear, So soon forsaken? Young men's love then lies Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes" (2.3.70-72). The wise friar, who knows Romeo better than anyone else in the play, sees this new romance for what it is, the desperate attempt of two young people to prove their live will have more meaning and depth than the lives of those around them, when really they are just playing house.
For Juliet the situation is much the same in that she too puts Romeo in an impossible position by asking him to give up everything to be with her. When she cries out, "O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name" (2.2.36-37), she acts out the cliché of the love struck young teenager who can't live without her man.

In reality, young romances like that of Romeo and Juliet are brought out by the sense of isolation all teenagers, and adults for that matter, feel from the rest of the world, and from the need to have some kind of meaningful connection to another human being. This type of love causes, and is usually caused by loneliness, the love itself is just a disguise for loneliness, a temporary fix for the sense of disconnection we all feel from the world. Famous critic Clive James writes that in the end of this kind of relationship, "You are alone again. You were really alone all along. You have deceived yourself" (702).

It is not to say that this kind of love is wrong or somehow reprehensible, on the contrary, it is a rite of passage. I experienced this kind of overly dramatic emotion myself, with my first love. At sixteen I knew little of the world, let alone the opposite sex, and I met a man who I fell head over heels in love with. I felt that he was my whole world, everything that really mattered, and I let my feelings control me into cutting out everyone else in my life that took away from my time with him. Yet even while I was in love, I felt more alone than I ever had in my entire life because I was with someone who didn't truly understand me. We were pretending to live as one person, but really we were just two completely separate individuals temporarily obsessed with one another. Obsession is not love, it's just a way to keep our mind's so occupied, we don't realize how truly alone we are.

However, love, no matter what form it comes in, is always a blessing. Clive James puts it best when he says, "When you love, the problem begins, and so does your real life" (702). After all, a life without love is really just a series of meaningless activities piling up on each other with each passing moment.

In The Female Brain M.D. Louann Brizendine argues that falling in love is a natural instinct caused by hormones in our brains telling us who would make the best mate. She describes love as an emotion based on chemicals, but also on both physical and emotional connection, claiming that human beings feel an instinctive need for this kind of intimate bond. Brizendine argues that, "The drive to fall in love is always hovering in the background. Being in love, however, requires making room in your life and your brain for the beloved, actually incorporating him into your self image..."(68) For a lasting relationship to come out of love, the love has to come out of mutual understanding and acceptance, which is the reason why true love does not include loneliness, at least not the kind of desperate loneliness that comes out of feeling disconnected and misunderstood.

Although I don't believe that love is a mask for loneliness, I do believe that the feeling of loneliness can be caused by the loss of love. As Brizendine states, "When love is lost, abandoned men are three to four times more likely to commit suicide. Women, by contrast, sink into depression" (75). Falling out of love, or being rejected by the one you love, can be the most depressing and lonely experience of your life.

However, the pain brought on by a broken heart is a necessary part of life. As Brizendine puts it, "It may be that the "brain pain" of lost love evolved as a physical alarm to alert us to the dangers of social separation" (76). Brizendine's argument is that social connection is necessary, both to our future offspring and to our own well being. Social connection is what keeps us feeling like a part of the world, what keeps us from being too lonely to function, and love is the most powerful example of social connection there is.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera creates a couple named Tereza and Tomas, whose love keeps them tied together, not through happiness, but through misery. Tereza loves Tomas the way every man should be loved, and Tomas loves Tereza in the same way Tereza loves her dog Karenin, a puppy who won't leave her side, and who needs her for his basic survival. Kundera describes the love of Tereza and Karenin as, "...a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back" (297).
This is why the love between Tereza and Tomas could never really work; human beings are selfish, and love does come with expectations. You are expected to be faithful and completely give yourself to the one you love, and Tomas not having the ability to do this is what left Tereza miserable, and what kept them from ever really being a couple. They were just two separate people, tied together by an incomplete love, and for Tereza, her time with Tomas was the loneliest of her life.

Tereza's thoughts of Tomas's love were that, "She had always secretly reproached him for not loving her enough. Her own love she considered above reproach, while his seemed mere condescension" (309). His love might as well have been condescension, because when two people do not love each other equally it is not a healthy or happy kind of love, it can only breed insecurity, despair, and loneliness.

At a certain point in their relationship, Tereza became so accustomed to her own misery, that during lovemaking "She no longer cried out as she had in the past, and, at the moment of orgasm, her grimace seemed to him to express suffering and a strange absence" (226). Tereza was trying to separate herself emotionally from Tomas because sometimes it is better to be completely alone, than to be alone in love.

After Tomas and Tereza move to the country, they seem happier because they are away from distractions and can enjoy each other without threat of Tomas's infidelity. However, this is when love really is a disguise for loneliness, because they are just trying to pretend that everything in their relationship is intact, and that their love can keep them together, even though their love was ruined a long time ago, and can never be repaired.

Yet, Tereza continued to stay with Tomas because, "Even with Tomas she was obliged to behave lovingly because she needed him" (289). This is the reason many couples who are alone in love stay together; they need each other to keep from feeling truly alone. At least if they're together, they can pretend that their life and soul is connected to another human being.

Clive James writes of love, "That we feel bound by a steady longing for freedom, and that we also seek to bind someone else, without being convinced that such a thing is within our rights-that is what makes any loving relationship so problematic" (702). This is what Tomas feels, a never ending to be free of responsibility and obligation, but love isn't an obligation, it's a privilege and a blessing, and men like Tomas don't deserve it. If two people are willing to share equally of this blessing, to bind each other together and to live the life of one, then they will not be lonely, because their connection will be real.

Humanitarian Mother Teresa writes of her feelings on love and loneliness:
When Christ said: ''I was hungry and you fed me,'' he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.

Human beings feel a distinct and tangible need not to be alone, and many people equate this need for connection with love, but that is not what real love is about. This is why so many people are alone in their love, because they are living a life of pretend; a life where
their need to be with someone outweighs their need to be understood. A love ruled by need and not by want is not real love at all.
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