Have you ever felt like you have done everything conceivable to make a relationship work and there is nothing but drama anyway? Have you ever loved someone more than life itself, but they disvalue that love? Have you ever sacrificed something for another, only to have them not appreciate your generosity? All of us, as we all have feelings, have experienced something like this…… “Life is strange. So many people cross our paths during our years on earth. Many of them will be in our life from day one to the final hour,” says Zane in her collection of novellas, ‘Love Is Never Painless’ that explore the deeper side of love; the side rarely explored in romance novels. “Then there are the “other ones.” People who are only in our lives for a minute, a day, a week, a month, a year, or a few years,” she continues. “We cannot understand how the relationships with them can start out seemingly perfect and end in total madness. How can two people love each other, create children together, cohabitate, build a life together, and then end up hating each other in the end? No one enters into a relationship expecting it to fail. No one gives of their heart and soul in exchange for being mistreated, either mentally or physically. Yet anger happens. Abuse happens. Cheating happens. Death happens.” In the novel, ‘Wuthering Heights’, Emily Bronte, also puts “when love hurts“ into perspective more clearly. The book tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earn Shaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys both themselves and many around them. In the book, Heathcliff, an orphan raised by Catherine’s family forms an early bond with his foster sister Catherine Earnshaw, and they both fall passionately in love with each other as they grow. Despite returning Heathcliff’s love utterly, Catherine chooses another childhood friend Edgar Linton for marriage, she considers Heathcliff far beneath her because he is poor. But after a couple of years in marriage, Catherine acknowledges to both men that Heathcliff is her true love. Catherine’s marriage to Edgar builds anger and bitterness in Heathcliff. Meanwhile Edgar deeply loves Catherine but miserably fails to reconcile his love for her with her feelings for her childhood friend Heathcliff. Not wanting to give away the end of the book, it is enough to say that this tragic love triangle brings nothing but pain and destruction. And who to blame for the tragedy that unfolds? Heathcliff, Edgar or Catherine? Take it or leave it, none of the above are to blame. Love is to blame. Perhaps ‘Wuthering Heights’ may not make sense to you given the fact that it is a perfect work of fiction. But when you take a close look in the world around us you will realise, Emily Bronte was not far from the truth. Even in real life two people are capable of ‘falling deeply in love with one person like Heathcliff and Edgar. As such you have men in society with more than one wife while others are forced to commit murder when they discover somebody else is in love with their partner. Likewise many women or girls today decide to get married to men they don’t love just for the sake of money and convenience just like Catherine. And the end result is not very different. When these girls or women decide to get married for the sake of money, after a couple of years in the marriage reality dawns on them: there is more to life than money. These women end up cheating on their husbands (some end up getting infected with HIV/AIDS) and others never enjoy their marriage bonds. While all of the above can be devastating, the truth of the matter is in that old saying: “It is better to love and have lost than to never have loved at all.” No matter what the circumstances, no matter what the outcome, love is what makes life worth living. Like Victor M.Garcia Jr a renowned scholar of literature once said, ”Love is like the truth, sometimes it prevails, sometimes it hurts.” Contact: Ubernie@gmail.com
