Does it really exist?

I started to think about what love really is when reading the poem Modern Love. George Meredith, the poet, seemed to think that love is dead, and bleak, basically nonexistent. As a young lady who is constantly learning about life, and love and the balance between, I would have to disagree. This may be due to my young age, and lack of experience as anyone else who has that outlook on love, but from what I have experienced I still believe that love is alive, and well. Although, Meredith does bring up a good point in bringing to light the hardships of a relationship, I do not think that the two that he writes about were really in love. You should be able to fight together to make your relationship work if you really love that other person. I am young, but I do know that if the other person is not fighting for you, and putting in no effort they do not love you, and it is something that is very hard to hear, but it is reality. On the contrary to what other people of today believe, there are still people out there who will give their partner what they do need in a relationship. What I think the two in the poem were missing was the give and take, communication, trust, and passion. The love they did have was probably great at one point, but because the love was not true love it fizzled and died out. A couple that is truly meant to be will fight endless amounts of times to continue to love one another, no matter how hard it is. I wanted to connect this to relationships I have been in, and relationships that my friends have been in. We are all young, we all have a lot of time left, if God willing, to find out what we need in a relationship, and who we are truly meant to be with. There have been many people that I know that have been in relationships that started out amazingly, even my own, but later on one person just was not putting enough effort into the relationship because they did not feel true, unconditional love for that person. When a relationship is like that there is not anywhere for it to go, but nowhere. Which is what happened with the subjects in Meredith's poem, even though they were married, it still was not true love. Which also proves that in love there are mistakes because we are still human, and love does not change the fact that we are what we are. The only way for love to work, because it still does exist in our society, and did in the past, is for someone to truly love one another for better or for worse. Once you find that person, then you'll really believe me when I say as optimistic teen that love is still alive. 

Who are you to judge?

Cultural relativism is the principle regarding the beliefs, values, and practices of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself. We use the phrase "Don't judge a person until you've walked in their shoes" often in our society; but do we really practice what we preach? The people of our society seem to lack the ability to empathize with others in different situations, and often judge quickly and think negatively of them. We do not understand the oppression that one group of people has to withstand, and we say things like "why can't you just let it go?" or "why is that so important, people are killed all over the world, and you don't see me complaining about it." Our society may say that they practice cultural relativism, but they do not live up to their word. A prime example of the American society of not practicing it would be people against the Black Lives Matter movement. This is important to many people of the black culture, because of how the people of the culture feel its people are being treated, constantly. We see people, mainly from white culture, saying things like "rallying is not going to do anything, so what is the point?" when they do not understand the everyday life as an African-American. In the book Things Fall Apart, white people are coming over trying to change the ways of the people of these tribes because they don't understand who they are, and what their culture is. They start to tell them that their gods are false, and they need to be converted into Christians. I feel that Chinua Achebe, the author, wrote this to put into perspective for people on other parts of the world to grasp what was really going on. He points out the absence of cultural relativity back then, which brings it to modern day readers that there is still an absence in our society. Yes, we have improved on our tolerance, but we still judge because it is hard to understand someone else's situation when you have never been in it. Can we as a society grow to really practice this? Will people ever get it? The only thing we can do now is take this, and improve ourselves, and learn to not judge a person until we can fully understand what they have to go through.

Is Marriage and Romance Dead?

Larissa Smith
Mrs. Burnett
12 AP English
31 October 2015

In reading the play The Importance of Being Earnest, I began to question all that I knew about romance. The couples Jack and Gwendolyn, and Algernon and Cecily acted as if romance was not required in a relationship, which is the complete opposite that any one person learns when dealing with relationships of that caliber. They treated marriage as if it were some game, and the goal was to make it look good to everyone else no matter if there was real love in it. To me, a marriage requires: love, trust, compassion, respect, communication, friendship, etc. the list goes on. Marriage is a special bond between two people, and people should not get married just because they feel as if they have to, or to make themselves look good. Gwendolyn reminded me of many people in our society today that just look for someone just to be with someone, and for it to make them look better. She agrees to marry Jack, not because she has known and loved him, but because his name is Ernest. She marries him for his name. She did not even consider if she really would want to be with someone for the rest of her life. Which is the complete opposite of romance. This began to raise a question for me, is romance dead? Do people care about love like they used to, or is marriage just an option that people are forced to take in life? There are so many occasions where I see married couples who just are not happy at all, who get married to make their parents happy, or just because that IS the thing to do when you become an adult, right? Yes, there are those special couples who still do love each other, and actually want to be together, but are the people of my generation jumping into relationships just to be in a relationship? We are all still teenagers, but these are the years that we're supposed to be experimenting and figuring out what we want/need in a relationship. Instead of actually figuring it out, people are just dating to date, for people to know that they have a partner. This worries me, are we going to be the generation of married couples in loveless marriages? We are not doing the right things in relationships now, when we are supposed to be learning about it. So, will we ever know how to love, will romance ever recover from this?