The Emotional Nature of Love in Love is a Fallacy and Romeo and Juliet Essay

The Emotional Nature of Love in Love is a Fallacy and Romeo and Juliet - Essay Example Love is an emotional response, something that can interact with logic, sometimes agreeing with it, sometimes overpowering it, and sometimes falling to it, but they are inherently different things. Love is probably the most often used theme in works of fiction – it is powerful, evocative, can easily create conflict, and people care about it more than almost anything else. Shakespeare is one of the English language’s most famous playwrights largely because of his ability to depict the emotional rollercoaster that is a romantic relationship. In the story â€Å"Romeo and Juliet† Shakespeare shows the essentially illogical, emotional nature of love. This story does emotionally heighten the importance of love, both by seemingly contrasting love with death on several occasions and by artificially raising the stakes of love by making the two lovers part of rival families bent on a blood feud. â€Å"Romeo and Juliet† and â€Å"Love is a Fallacy† actually agr ee on the most important point about love: that it is an emotional response that is separate from reason. The stories differ, however, in their portrayal of love: in â€Å"Romeo and Juliet† love acts as an uncontrollable force, whereas love is depicted as something one can choose in â€Å"Love is a Fallacy,† and â€Å"Romeo and Juliet† displays a selfless love, while â€Å"Love is a Fallacy† depicts love as entirely driven by self-interest.... Coveting something is very different from loving something, and this contrast of love and coveting shows that love, unlike covetousness, cannot be a calculated thing. In fact, the main character does not even use the word â€Å"love† until the end of the poem, in a setting where it seems like a calculated move to try to acquire the thing he covets, Polly. Polly cleverly shows that every expression of love that the main character can possibly create is a logical fallacy of some sort – again highlighting the emotional nature of love, which falls in the face of reason. â€Å"Romeo and Juliet† also depicts love as something that is entirely emotional, because the protagonists regularly commit acts that are entirely unreasonable and in fact harmful to themselves and others because of love. Juliet, for instance, asks Romeo to â€Å"deny [his] father and refuse [his] name† in order to form a romantic relationship with her (Shakespeare, 2.2). It is entirely unreas onable to expect someone to give up their family and their whole life, but love, clearly, is not a reasonable thing – Romeo does in fact give everything up for her. Furthermore, both Romeo and Juliet commit suicide at the end of the story when they think their lover is dead, showing an almost hysterically emotional response. Clearly, love and logic are entirely separate things in both â€Å"Love is a Fallacy† and â€Å"Romeo and Juliet† Though both stories agree that love is â€Å"fallacious† in the sense that it is illogical, they disagree on how love affects one’s self. In â€Å"Love is a Fallacy† all of the characters are able to choose whom they are attracted to, whereas in