Today we are pleased to share a writing sample from a CISL San Diego student, Victor Facciolla. Victor’s essay “Love and Passion” is beautifully written and shares his thoughtful insight into a subject that confuses all of us from time to time! Thank you to Victor for sharing this essay with us and thanks to his teacher, Charles, for helping with the edits. Enjoy!
Love and Passion
By Victor Facciolla
Is it possible to find the truth about love? Can we say something about love, only using our rational mind? Has anybody ever given a definition of love that understands it in its entire complexity?
Probably the answer to all of these questions is “no.” We can’t understand love, and we cannot define it. Perhaps love is something that we can only feel, but that we can never understand. And knowing that, some people still try to define it, and make it rational. When this is the situation, we probably hear a lot of wrong opinions and ideas about love. People are always trying to define it because giving a definition to things we cannot understand problably makes them more easy to comprehend. Human beings love to define. It is said that scientists knows 90% of human DNA. And what do people do when they hear this? They say that the other 10% represents our soul; unfortunately, there is no evidence to support this assertion. It just feels more comfortable to define it this way.
Unfortunately, giving it a simple definition doesn’t make love an easy mechanism to deal with. People always have problems in their relationships, and in therapy we can see that people are always complaining about love and passion. Boyfriends that don’t give their girlfriends enough attention, women complaining about men’s attitudes, men complaining about women’s attitudes. These are themes that everybody in the world discusses.
Because people have a difficult time defining love, they sometimes cannot understand and separate their thoughts. For example, a lot of people think that love and passion are the same thing. But maybe we should say that they are not, because there are actually quite a few differences between them. So first let’s try to define passion.
Passion usually happens in the beginning of the relationship when you feel that your partner is the best in the world. You feel like you’re in heaven, and you see your partner as a god. If you are feeling something close to this, then you can say that you’re in the passion stage. Some scientists say that passion is something close to a disease because it’s very close to delirium. When passion happens you are not able to see that your partner may have some problems. And even when your friends tell you so, you just ignore them.
But passion doesn’t last forever. And after the first months of the relationship, passion starts to go away, giving place to love. When love begins, the problems of your partner start to appear. And you cannot see him as a god anymore. You just see him as a normal human being. If you choose to continue the relationship even with your partner’s problems, we could say that you’re in love. So it’s obvious that love is not a perfect thing as everybody says. Love is something that makes you continue with a person even after seeing that he or she is not perfect.
With this definition we can think about some legends and myths that people usually use to talk about love. For example, after knowing that love is not a perfect thing, could you say that Romeo really loved Juliet? Or could you say that Cinderella loved the Prince? With our definition we can say that both of these stories don’t talk about love, but about passion. Romeo didn’t have enough time to know Juliet’s problems; he saw her only as a goddess. Romeo didn’t love Juliet, he only had passion for her. That’s why Romeo and Juliet are so perfect. Maybe the way we imagine love is only a figment of our imagination.