Introduction
Love can be simply defined as a feeling of intense affection towards someone or something. Memory on the other hand from a psychological point of view can be defined as the ability of an organism to recall stored information and retain it including past experiences. The relationship between love and memory is that often when love comes to its inevitable end, there are usually sweet memories about the love that people once shared. These sweet memories are in actual sense very painful especially if one was left by his or her lover while they were still in love with them. Therefore at the end of any love relationship there must be someone who will suffer psychologically due to the recollections that they have concerning the love they once shared.
Various Love Forms
There are different types of love that can be felt by a person. The commonly known love types include affection, passionate love, friendship, infatuation, puppy love, sexual love, platonic love, romantic love and many other terms that could be coined out to basically describe love (Harris, 1). Therefore, it comes to a conclusive end that love does indeed lacks a definition and hence the many partially overlapping collections of findings that try to vividly describe this phenomenal feeling.
Sexual love can be defined as an attraction that leads to one having a sexual intercourse with another person. Sexual love is clearly portrayed in the Reader. This is in part I of the book where Michael realizes that he has an attraction for the 36 year old Hanna Schmitz while he was coming to convey his gratitude for helping him 3 months earlier. Though he felt embarrassed of being noticed by her of the fact that he watched her get dressed, and to this fact ran away, Michael returned later and was seduced while bathing by her. This is seen to have culminated into an affair heated with sexual love later on. Michael is seen to be regularly returning to the apartment of Hanna so that they could bathe together and later on have sex or do both at the same time. This initial love could as well be compared to infatuation as these two sexual lovers are said to have remained emotionally detached from each other as much as they were physically involved in sexual activities. This lack of true and sincere love and affection is further portrayed from the fact that Michael could get abused physically by Hanna (Schlink, 9). Verbal abuses were also usually directed towards him. Since such emotional outbursts ought not to be directed towards someone that you love passionately, it can be conclusive to state that they were not truly muddily in love as of that time.
As much as it seemed to be more of infatuation that true love during their first moments, it should also be noted that not everyone can easily indulge in love. So as to experience the full satisfactory love feeling, one needs humility that s true, discipline, faith and courage (Fromm, 3). Normally between any two people who would wish to be in love, there always exists a virtual wall that ought to be brought down with time.
After a while, infatuation that is mostly mistaken for love would eventually put itself out there in the open. In Michael’s case, he starts to feel some kind of emotional disturbance after Hanna’s sudden disappearance. He thinks that due to him spending more time with his friends that Hanna has caused her leaving. It is from this that we realize that Michael indeed had true affection for Hanna since to him, Hanna’s memory tainted relationships with other women.
The phenomenon in which Michael finds himself trapped in to is however well explained in the “Art of Loving”. According to the author, the initial stage of people knowing each other intimate but later tends to loose the magic of intimacy. Disappointments and mutual boredom in between them would kill all elements of the initial excitement. Perhaps that was what Hanna felt and thus decided to run away.
A love that is expressed as friendship is also highlighted in the reader. This perhaps could be the best description of the feeling between Sophie and Michael. Although Michael might have had a crush on her, their friendship does not get any father from just friendship. However this friendship is portrayed as the fist step of betraying Hanna. This is because by Michael spending a lot more time with Sophie and other friends of his, he was in actual sense reducing the time he would have spend with Hanna. This suddenly is a strange friendship relationship (Ainsworth, 45).
Despite all the inconclusive clear definition of what love is it is obvious that there are various love forms apart from the common romantic love that everyone out that longs for. A vivid example would be one, love that a grandfather can show for his grand children, and two, the love that he may feel for his wife (Davis and Holly, 8). Further more clearly, one cannot expressly say that they love all children equally because it would be a clear lie on the face. This is because no matter who you are the possibility of you loving other children in equally magnitude to your own children assuming you are in good terms with them are very minimal. The above can only be a path towards showing that there are various forms of love that do exist depending on the affection that one shows for another person or thing. It is no surprise that some people out there love their jobs more than their own wives, well, it is all a matter of how much affection one feels for other people.
Various Types of Love Emotions
People will usually portray different kinds of emotional feelings in reaction to people they love. An example is when a grandfather ends up meeting his grand children, he will portray some Emotional reaction on meeting them due to the love he feels for these children. However such emotions of affections are missed out by Michael. He is shown not to have had any emotional connection with his own father who would even an appointment placed by his own children just to see him. On the other hand should two newly wed couples be left alone in a room, we can only imagine the kinds of emotions that will be portrayed due to the affection and love that they have for each other.
However emotional suffering is often felt due to love gone sour or due to feeling of betrayal by someone you once loved. Michael in “The reader” experiences this feeling later on in life after meeting with Hanna since the day she left. The fact that Hanna s being accused in a court of law for having committed some offences and readily accepts to a plea of guilty makes Michael feel guilty for having loved her. To Michael, he has suddenly realized that Hanna was a criminal who had no remorse. This indeed brings emotional suffering to Michael.
Effects of Love
Being heart broken is not the only effect that might arise due to falling in love. Therefore contrary to what is obviously expected as the good outcomes of love like making one a better human being or just turn one into being more kind, love can make your life a real misery. A person might become heartsick over another certain individual or some peoples partner may make them develop a feeling of being a person of no usefulness, i.e. just a worthless individual.
The fact that Michaels’ mirage was brief proves hat he was never really into the marriage in the first place. In other words Michael did truly fell for Hanna in the long run. This is so especially after Michael realizes that the major obstacle and actually the root of all problems in Hanna’s’ life all rotated around the fact that she could not read. The love and affection for Hanna that felt by Michael fully developed in the long run. This shown especially after Hannah commits suicide. After this incident, the writer portrays Michael as having become broken hearted. Clearly it is because he was never again going to be with this person or ever see this person again that he had truly felt affection for.
The effects of love are quite strong even more than imagined by a majority of people. Recent research has shown that these effects of being struck by love are an equivalent of the effect of cocaine on the brain. A love that is romantic could in accrual sense be as emotionally fundamental as feeling of thirst or even hunger. A certain social psychologist, Arthur Aron at the New York State University, Stony Brook has carried out experiments to show this. This was by the use of scanning the brains of young women and men who were lovelorn or had madly fallen in love. These participants for this experiment obviously had different emotions in their memories while thinking of their loved ones. They however all of them were showing among other things activation of the nucleus of the medial caudate in the brain. Such activation is interpreted medically as portraying a deep need signal of satiation. This region along with others are always know to be active after one get what they most desire for example cocaine, Food, water and to some extend especially teenage boys, a girlfriends’ call would light up those activations like a Christmas tree (Fehr, 430).
Conclusion
Love and emotions are closely interlinked. Whenever one feels love for another person, the person will definitely get an emotional attachment to it. In the long run, the more love you feel for someone, the more and higher your emotions hget build. Therefore just being able to see that person that you hold deep affection for is enough to quench you thirsty emotions just for a short while. However when you are no longer together with the person that you love, it is equally an emotional toll to you.
Works Cited
Ainsworth, Salter. Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978.
This can be described as a study of psychologically strange situations. It describes this through a series of 8 episodes. It shows the emotional attachment especially due to the love between a mother and an infant.
Davis, Keith & Holly, Latty-Mann. Love Styles and Relationship Quality: A Contribution To Validation. Columbia: Sage Publications, 1967.
This book tries to predict qualities of relationships in couples and individuals. It shows what exists between love friendships. Various researches are done by use of 70 undergraduate heterosexual couples.
Fehr, Booth & Russell, Johnson. The concept of love viewed from a prototype perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3: (1991): 425-438.
The journal tries to explain that love is perceived differently. Participants in a study are asked to list features of love among other things. The many types of love are also judges by participants.
Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000.
Harris, Betty. Types of Love. 2010. Web.
Betty who graduated with a B.A. in Psychology defines the various types of loves. She explains of the four main common types of love. There are however more types of love depending on ones definition of love.
Schlink, Benhard. The Reader. Massachusetts: Random House Inc., 1998.