by Graydyl

Created on: April 07, 2010

Love: An Idealized Paradox

"We all know that beautiful things are often unreal."

- Three Men and One Woman (Shen Ts’ung-wen)

If only love were as simplistic and painless as we idealize it to be. Love gives us headaches, heartaches … yet it continues to be the one emotion that we all desire and strive to attain. We will never be able to linearly define and pinpoint the emotion and concept of love – it’s nearly impossible to create a universal model or definition applicable to every situation and every individual. This bothers us. We hate not being able to take control of every situation and preempt every emotional letdown. I believe that though we will never reach total enlightenment and understanding of “love”, the close examination and dissection of love through various tangible sites will bring us closer to the concept and allow us to determine for ourselves how to approach it based on our internal desires, needs, and purposes.

We all have our ideals of what we believe and desire love to be—what we may overlook, however, is that realistically, this idealized love is an unreachable target. Through certain situations and experiences, we may come to this realization, yet the ideal continues to exist in our subconscious. Perhaps it is the awareness of how our ideal of love is so unattainable that makes it so desirable. The impossibility of the perfected model of love, and our knowledge of its impossibility, intensifies our drive and passion. This introduces the concept of the paradox of love: what defines this passionate emotion is precisely our inability to grab hold of it. In my paper, I will analyze romantic love and its dynamics strictly through a few texts, used as fields of representation for reality. Utilizing the media around us allows us to gain experience vicariously and in turn, develop our own individual mindset and perceptions of the concept. 

"Three Men and One Woman" by Shen Ts’ung-wen portrays the different levels of the intensity of love, and the extent to which it can drive one to cross barriers. The three men in the text all have one thing in common: unrequited love for the “divine creature” (256)—the girl “was like a pot of flowers that belonged to none of [them]” (261). The fact that they are all unable to fulfill their idealized love due to the rigidity of social class paradoxically intensifies their desire for her; it is only through her death that we

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