Love and Feelings - the Keys to a Successful Relationship

English 1012

April 29, 2013

Love and Feelings: The Keys to a Successful Relationship.

         In the passage “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” by Audre Lorde, the author discusses the erotic as a creative power which enables a couple can feel and share feelings profoundly with another person. If couples share any matter like happiness or sorrow with each other, they can understand each other perfectly. This way, they can lessen the threat of their differences. In addition, the author argues that pornography is a sensation without feeling that Anglo Americans use as erotic, but she gives a sophisticated meaning of erotic like exchange of feelings, emotions and knowledge. In the poetry of Alice Walker, she writes about women’s freedom which is dominated by men. Moreover, she says that women should not be silent against any kind of oppression because It is a woman’s right to share any feelings. However, I think the two authors are straight forward and both emphasize that when love and feelings are absent from a couple, the couple will not be happy.

What does constitute a happy couple? Love is one of the most interesting things in the world that helps to be intimate with another person. Intimacy is a word which sticks together true love. Love means caring and sharing emotions with each other intensely. How is it possible for a couple to have sex instead of making love? Sex with love and sex without love are different. Sex without love can give pleasure, but it is for a temporary enjoyment. On the other hand, sex with love is permanent because a couple can know each other by sharing their thoughts thoroughly that joins their mind, joins their soul. Sex is sensational. Some people can say that sex is the same, with or without love. I say that although both categories do sex, they have a huge difference in mentality. When a couple does sex for intimacy, other category has sex only for temporary enjoyment. The couple who has sex without love will forget each other after finishing sex. This is because they do not know each other, but the couple with love has sex as the fulfillment of their love. After sex with love they feel closer to each other like glue. Glue makes something very close that cannot detach. For this reason, Audre Lorde writes “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers”. Here the bridge means love which is long lasting. Love brings couples together to keep in touch always that can reduce their gap. Perhaps, this connection will last permanently like glue, and the connection is certainly making love between them. Thus, Audre Lorde encourages readers to think tremendously for sharing any matter for making love with each other, so does Walker. Most of the divorces happen due to a lack of love. We can reduce this gap by sharing deeply and by making love, Walker does too. For this reason Alice Walker writes:         “While love is unfashionable

                                                         Let us live

                                                        unfashionably.

                                                        Seeing the world        

                                                        a complex ball” (1-5)

In ancient times, many people did not think much about their earning, eating and working, but they spent a lot of time with each other. They knew themselves greatly by sharing and caring that created a strong bond of love between them, but now we are very fashionable this means we give the most priority on earning more and more money to buy more and more fashionable things. Moreover, most of us are always trying to do more work to earn more money rather than thinking about each other. Thus, a gap of love is increasing day by day. For this reason, the author says to go back because she prioritizes love rather than monetary assets because sometimes we are making our life difficult.

What else is needed to be a happy couple? Feeling is one of the most important human parts that help us to feel intensely. Also, it is emotion or the sympathetic perception of a human being. Moreover, it is a kind of reaction of our thoughts and thinking. We can feel both good and bad sides: it depends on our mind. Without true feelings for each other, there is selfishness. For this reason, in the poem “Gift,” Walker writes:               “The gift has already been

                                                                 received.

                                                                 Curse me then,

                                                                 and take away” (4-7)

In spite of having true feelings for her husband, probably Walker is not happy with her husband. That is because her husband does not have true feelings to her. Here the word ‘gift’ means soul that is given to Walker. Then, her husband takes it back which refers to the feelings of selfishness without thinking about others. Walker expresses her grief in this poem that reflects their conjugal life which did not last longer. She advises us that feelings or sympathy should be open minded so that the relation can be a perfect bond of intimacy to each other. In the poem “Mysteries,” Walker expresses her feeling that lover or couple lives together but, they share less feelings to each other that is weird. Walker uses the word ‘lost’ (11), that means that we are forgetting to share our feelings properly. It is a kind of abuse of feelings. Similarly, Lorde writes: “And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity- abuse of feeling.” This indicates that misunderstanding of feelings is a kind of abuse of state of mind.