Love Is Not All By Lizzie Dzivulsky
We often categorize tragedy with love. We think love is all we need. This cliché appears in books, movies and life. Love is the world’s most complex unsolved mystery and it doesn’t come with directions. We understand how the planets spin, but we can hardly tell when someone close to us is hurting. When two people commence a romantic relationship they think they’re signing up for love, but that’s not all they get. In most cases, where love goes tragedy follows. In the movie 500 Days of Summer there is a very interesting quote:“This is a story about love, not a love story.” This quote unleashes the fact that stories of love aren’t always love stories; some, end as tragedies such as the world renowned play by William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. So why does suffering accompany romance? We try so hard to make love work whenever we see a glimpse of it, and it all goes to waste. Could it be the naivete of our kind or the unrealistic expectations we force on ourselves? Or is it just a part of life that we have to learn and overcome? In the next few pages I will compare and contrast 500 Days of Summer with Romeo and Juliet, explain how love leads to suffering, why it is important to stage human suffering and what tragedy means. Both 500 Days of Summer and Romeo and Juliet are love stories that lead to suffering. Both stories are similar and different. Romeo and Juliet is a true tragedy not just because Romeo and Juliet die, but because they couldn’t walk on this earth if they weren’t together. Their desire to be with each other was so strong that it made disabled them. They became so codependent on each other that life without each other was more morbid than death itself. 500 Days of Summer is not a tragedy because the hero of the story, Tom, overcomes his misery and discovers his true passion and tries to fulfill it. Although these stories differ in genre they have very similar motifs. For example, Tom believes the only way his life will stop feeling drab is when he meets the girl of his dreams, and there’s only one girl that can fulfill all his needs. He becomes so dependent on Summer that he doesn’t accept the fact that Summer is breaking up with him. Dependency and the idea that one cannot go on without another person is reoccurring. This idea is absurd. If you already have lived without a person for a number of years, then you can indeed live without them. This is technically true, but when someone finds someone they’ve been desperately searching for they don’t want to let go. Most people desire to be in relationships so they can feel happy and loved, but life doesn’t work that way, and people end up getting hurt in their pursuit of happiness. One of the biggest reasons love ends in suffering is result of the crazy expectations and standards people create. If everyone who desires someone else stopped pushing for relationships and love to happen, then love would happen. Suffering comes about when someone realizes the person they thought they wanted doesn’t end up being the person they thought they were. This is also a result of high standards and expectations. Relationships are tempting, especially when you feel lonely. My point is that we shouldn’t rely on other people for our own happiness, or for someone to save us from our heartache. Sometimes you need to be your own hero and save your own heart, because the people you can’t imagine living without can actually live without you. Real tragedy is rarely popularized, it’s too real for most people to fully grasp. It’s the part of the movie that isn’t displayed. Real tragedy is when you don’t learn from your mistakes the tenth time around. An example of real tragedy is when someone is going through a rough time and kill Acorn