How Being in Love Can Change People

“How Being in Love can Change People”

In the three marvelous works, Matchstick Men, Punch-Drunk Love, and “Mama Day”, people are all changed greatly, and for the better by romantic or father/child love. How everyone knows that there is no one on Earth who is perfect, yet when there is love, we come so close to it. Within these three works of art, one can analyze how there is actual change through people when there is love present.

Cocoa states in Gloria Naylor’s “Mama Day”, “When I had come to New York seven years before that I had wondered about the need for such huge buildings. No one ever seemed to be in them very long; everyone was out on the sidewalks moving, moving, moving- and to where?” Cocoa starts out as a lost cause, going to New York as a resident tourist. Meeting George saved her vision of New York . . . . He knew what it was really about, “New York wasn’t on those Manhattan sidewalks, just the New Yorkers. My city was a network of small towns, some even smaller than here in Willow springs. It could be one apartment building, a handful of blocks, a single square mile hidden off with its own language, newspapers and magazines- its own judge and juries. You’d never realize that because you went and lived on our fringes.”

Cocoa was living in New York and had resided there for seven years, but was she seeing the real New York? Or was she seeing a New York fantasy world? …A forever-tourist New York resident. George insists that New York is much more than its’ buildings or looks, it’s the little things, “To live in New York you’d have to know about the florist on Jamaica Avenue who carried Yellow roses even though they didn’t move well, but it was his dead wife’s favorite color. The candy store in Harlem that wouldn’t sell cigarettes to twelve year olds without notes from their mothers. That they killed chickens below Houston, prayed to Santa Barbara by the East River and in Bensonhurst girls were still virgins when they married.”

One of the reasons why George offered to show Cocoa around New York was because she needed a “guide”. She had lived in New York for seven years and still had thought like a tourist, the same way of thinking she had had when she arrived seven years earlier. George did not want anything from Cocoa either, which might have scared her, “You just hadn’t met a man who wanted absolutely nothing from you but honesty.”

The first change in Cocoa was her view on New York. She completely changed how she saw things. She wrote letters to Mama Day and in response to one of the letters, Mama Day said, “Baby girl was seeing New York with someone special.”

Cocoa’s next change was not calling people food. She had had a big problem by calling people “fudge-sticks, kumquats, bagels, zucchinis, cherry-vanilla and tacos”. But as George and Cocoa’s friendly affair continued around New York every weekend, Cocoa’s bad habit stopped, and George was the first to notice, “you were learning the difference between a Chinese, a Korean, a Vietnamese, a Filipino, that Dominicans and Mexicans weren’t all Puerto Ricans. You could finally pick out German Jews, Russian Jews, Hasidies and Israelis.”

Not only was Ophelia changing, but George was changing too. “I was so busing enjoying the change in you, I didn’t notice it in myself. Sure I’d was any old pair of jeans stomping around the streets alone and the ones I met you in were freshly pressed. I’d gone into taking a moment over deciding which aftershave from two days of not shaving at all.” George really cared about how he appeared to Ophelia.

George wanted to be at his best and Ophelia was becoming her best all because of how their changes in love brought them together, very similar to the 2002 film, Punch-Drunk Love,