The Infinity of Love – Finding Truth in Love Stories

The sensation of “love” is one that most, if not all, human beings experience at some point in their life, and yet it is such a complex and abstract concept that no two accounts can agree on the specifics. This makes it rather difficult to express in concrete terms exactly what constitutes “love.” Is it possible to construct a love story that could be considered “true” without resorting to the tired cliches that have somehow become synonymous with the idea of love? In her short story, “Happy Endings,” Margaret Atwood ¹ approaches this dilemma by revealing her belief that the concept of love is identical across all stories, but it is the “true connoisseurs … [who] favor the stretch in between” because that is where the individual truths can be found. It is only through this approach that an author can begin to tell a “true” love story in defiance of the cliche tropes common to the genre.

If it is truly the “stretch in between” which make a love story true, then a paragon of this approach would be Junot Diaz’s short story, The Cheater’s Guide to Love,“² where this trait forms the backbone of Diaz’s storytelling method. By breaking down Yunior’s separation into sections by year, Diaz allows the reader to observe the transition and transformation Yunior undergoes in a compartmentalized and highly visible manner. Without this lens to focus the attention, this story would be as sparse as Atwood warns, because at its core,”Cheaters Guide” is a simple story about a mans infidelit and the consequences. However, by drawing the reader in year by year, Diaz is allowed to connect the reader directly to the events and inner monologue, especially through his use of the second person point of view. By connecting directly to the readers in this way, Diaz can expose one of the critical and core truths that must be explored in order to make proper sense of “love,” which is the dichotomy that exists between one person’s perceptions of love and another person’s perception of the same thing. For instance, the difference between Yunior and his friend Elivs as far as “love” and women are concerned: “Elvis encourages [Yunior] to try yoga … mad fucking ho’s in there, he says,” while Yunior is still recovering from his plantar vasciitis. This serves to highlight Elvis’s preoccupation with women as a source of comfort, which contrasts with Yunior’s budding personal understanding of “love.” In fact, in the very next paragraph, he admits to not taking the advice to “bone the shit out of her … [and] bust a nut in her mouth.” Thiw, amist the fact that he “finally start[s] work on [his] eighties apocalypse novel” further broadens the gulf between his and Elvis’s approach to romance. Finally, five years post-breakup, Yunior expses what is perhaps the most profound truth of the story, wherein he simply writes, “The half-life of love is forever.” This sentiment resonates amazingly within the concept of “love,” and seems to be a core truth, as it is a theme expressed by other authors, such as Langston Hughes, whose short story “Early Autumn” epitomizes both the idea of the “half-life of love” and the dichotomy that exists between two people’s perception of the same emotion.³

Langston Hughes’s “Early Autumn”⁴ responds to Atwood’s approach by assuming that his readers, by virtue of being human and having been exposed to love stories in the past, can fill in the skeleton plot points, and instead focuses almost entirely on the differences that make up the framework for this short story. Instead of laying out the basic “boy and girl fall in love” structure, Hughes leaves that story to the imagination of his readers and summariszes the important differences in the five sentences of his first paragraph, stating: “They had been in love … Then something not very important had come between them … She married a man she thought she loved [and] Bill went away.” However sparse, this is all the skeleton that Hughes needs in order to set up a story which explores Yunior’s concept of the “half-life of love”. This exploration picks up many years after the incidents of the opening, where Bill and his ex-lover Mary meet again, and the differences between the two character’s expectations and experiences become illuminated. Where Mary “lifted her face as though wanting a kiss,” Bill shakes her hand and considers that “she looked so old”. The gulf between them grows throughout the rest of the story, with Mary “desperately reaching back into the past” while Bill is content to live in the present. Furthermore, Hughes expounds upon the “half-life of love” by revealing that, while Bill had moved on from his previous feelings for Mary, Mary was still quite clearly in love with Bill, to the extent that “her youngest boy was named Bill,” and that this was likely the one love that she had which would never fully decay.

Poetry, however, can be a completely different affair. It seems to be that the overwhelming majority of poetry devoted to “love” focuses on the idyllic and perceived depictions of love, common to romanticism. For instance, Pablo Nerudia, in his poem “One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII”⁵ chooses to depict love as this somehow great and sublime experience that defies explanation, requiring him to instead contrast his love against lesser things, saying

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire

While this may be a deliberate attempt to hearken back to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, Neruda goes on, “I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,” which instead indicates that he is taking a sheltered look at the idea of love, isolating the idyllic qualities of love to the excluxion of all negativities. Rainer Marial Rilke commits a simliar offense with his “Love Song,”⁶ in which he depicts love as such a fragile and delicate thing that he must “keep [his] soul in [him] so that it doesn’t touch your soul.” This runs contrary to the experiences expressed in the short stories discussed earlier, seeming to suggest that the essence of “love” is a fragile beauty devoid of any and all harsh realities, and seems to be a sentiment only expressed in idealized poetry and whitewashed Disney fairy tales. However, this is not true of all love poetry. A poet can use this medium to connect with the audience in a profound manner similar to, if not deeper than, the prosaic author.

For example, poetry allows an author to connect more directly to the reader’s experiences by not presenting the plot points as “one thing after another, a what and a what and a what”⁷ but in a leading manner which guides the readers internal monologue to fill in the absent details. For instance, “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats⁸ drops the reader into the twilight years of the narrator, and by presenting key points, guides the mind into the narrator’s past, allowing the reader’s experiences to inform the setting. Yeats’s narrator appears to be suffering from the same experience as Mary in “Early Autumn,” and Yunior in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” and is presented as a person who never fully recovered from a lost love, saying:

When you are old and grey and full of slee,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

This description allows full reign for the reader to interpret the author’s sadness as their own, and guides the mind back to past experiences wherein th “half-life of love is forever.” In addition, “Fight” by Laurel Blossom⁹ allows this usage of guiding imagery to coexist with the theme of love’s dichotomy, which gives birth to a uniqueness of truth absent from the previous examples. “Fight” is structurally similar to Hughes’s “Early Autumn” in that it presents two opposing sides within a relationship, but by leaving the names and subjects absent, Blossom allows the poem to be about anyone, with the implication that it could very well be the reader’s own story. The final lines of the poem,

You want to get married. I want to be free.
You don’t seem to mind that we disagree.
And that is the difference between you and me.

paint an ominous picture of imminence that is easily related to.¹⁰

This is the core to a good love story, and the key to the formula that Atwood presents in “Happy Endings.” The story must resonate in a relatable way with the experiences of the reader, and this is what makes a simplified bullet-point plot structure ineffective as a love story.¹¹ As demonstrated by the above literary works, this resonance comes from the subtleties inherent in the areas between “boy meets girl” and “boy marries gir,” even in the relatively skeletal structure afforded to lvoe poets. Literature that hopes to illuminate the topic of love must delve deep within the personal experiences and, in the same way that the emotion itself funtions, reveal the deepest and darkest corners of experience, no matter how raw or sensitive those areas of the psyche may be, and it must drag those experiences to the forefront of the mind in order to connect more completely to the true cure of the emotion and to capture the essence of human love. Without this exposition, the only ways to describe “love” are to either whitewash the story into a fluffy piece devoid of substance, or to describe it, as Calvin and Hobbes once did, as “nothing but a biochemical reaction designed to make sure our genes get passed on.”¹²

I mean, I may have buried the lede on this one by saying I’d go into it as a retrospective. 4AM isn’t the time to really do that (though it’s sort of fitting, because as I recall that’s around about the time of night that I wrote the essay in the first place!) Though, that was probably much easier when I was 26. And, as I recall, that was the year that I was fired from the bus yard in order to return to school, so I don’t even think I had work in the morning (let alone maintenance coming to inspect the apartment as semi-annual maintenance), so being up at 4AM was slightly less irresponsible than it is right now.

But anyway, the biggest thing that I remember about this essay, and in fact all the essays from this class, was that I figured a new way that works best for me when writing anything, especially analytical texts. It’s a pretty simple structure that capitalizes on my very stream-of-consciousness style (need proof? Check any other article ont his site!). The basic workflow is as follows:

1. Just start writing. Write whatever you’re thinking. No, seriously: Anything and everything.
2. Just keep writing until you get to the next thought, and then write that one down too.
3. Keep going until you’ve covered as many points as you can even think of. There isn’t “too much” at this point
4. Break it up into bullet points, or combine things into longer structures. Just while the flow is there, you want to strike while that iron is hot.
5. Sleep on it – This is the most important step. Don’t try and crank out a full essay in one night! However, you might just be able to manage it in a night and a morning.
6. The next day, with a clear head and having already wrung yourself out of any and all ideas, go back through the jumble of things you wrote the night before.
7. See those loose smaller sound-bites of thoughts? The singular short-sentences of disjointed ideas? Start gathering them up all together into lgoical groups. See if you can build a coherent idea around which you can group them.
8. Those longer, more fleshed out thoughts? Pick the ones that flow nicely together. But don’t forget: make sure you have enough of your small ideas that can support the ones you choose. This is important.
9. Rearrange them. This is very much personal taste, just feel how they flow and get them in the right places at the right times so they just vibe.
10. Write some connective tissue if you need to. Link up the thoughts with an intro and an outro so they lead the paper through the connect-the-dots of random ideas
11. ???
12. Profit! You’re done!

I blame this for a few things. First, the over-reliance on lewd passages in the opening paragraphs. I think, if I can remember well enough, that I did this because I thought initially that i twould be hilarious to write “fuck” in a college essay. I guess it was just lucky that I had a thought forming into a thesis that was supported by the quotes. Second, that note about wishing I had spent a bit more time analyzing the poems one at a time. I can 100% guarantee that the only reason I lumped them together was because I was trying to consolidate my thoughts and probably didn’t have enough in my rambling precursor “outline” to dedicate entire paragraphs to them, so I figured I would collect them into the “now we’re talking about poems” section¹³. Lastly: that absolute manifesto of a closing argument. The style of the rant, and the ideas I approach in there… I can fairly certainly say that this was one of two things: Either it was the literal first thing I wrote (which I then dragged down to the back because it served better down there)… Or it was one of the very last things I wrote that day and I was really starting to feel the direction that this essay was going.

Either way, it was pretty cool to revisit this. I’ve included links to all the source material if anyone’s interested. Hell, I might dig back in and reread each of them to see if I can’t expand on some of this later.