What is Love in The gift of the magi by O Henry?
The famous Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you would be loved, love and be lovable.” But what is love, it can be defined by the Webster’s dictionary as a “profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.”
Even with that just being said countless poets, philosophers, and authors have fallen short of truly capturing the full meaning of love. The reason could lie in the differences of love and its ability to change throughout our lives.
When a baby is born and placed into the hands of loving parents, the love that the baby is able to get is vital in the development of it. The love or lack of love starts to change you from the beginning of your life and continues throughout adulthood. The young baby needs the love and wants the attention. It needs to be protected and cared for.
Undoubtedly there is a major love for a baby and the love of the baby for the mother. Interestingly some people say that they love chocolate, basketball, sex, and even cars. But that doesn’t fall into the Webster’s definition of being “profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.” Also it doesn’t agree with Benjamin Franklin’s, “If you would be loved, love and be lovable.” As everyone knows the game of basketball is not a person and it can’t love you back. So why would someone say that they love those things? I know from my own experiences that I have a passionate affection for playing the game and I feel a joy in playing it.
Continuing to blur the meaning of love with it’s diversity in the relationships we have for people and objects. For instance, I love my mom, dad, brothers, dog, sports, and many more. During certain periods of my life the love will certainly rise or fade. Also the intensity of that love is not the same in all those relationships. For I have never been in love with a girl, I may only imagine what it might be like to be in love. Guessing from my friends relationships with other girls it seems like a big headache instead of wonderful bliss like some poets maybe would like to put it.
When Benjamin Franklin said, “If you would be loved, love and be lovable,” he must have meant that love goes both ways. That not only is it important to love but also important in how it is received. To receive the love it must be trusted that the love is true, and that is where some problems start to arise. Nothing is wrong with trusting someone who can be trusted but when the trust gets broke that is when love turns from a wonderful bliss into a dark nightmare of hurt feelings. Nowhere did I read in Ben’s quote or the dictionary a message that love could hurt so bad. Why wouldn’t they dwell on the fact that love can hurt? Because the love that two people can share over a time in their lives is better than the bad time when the love went sour. Also many think that it is better to have loved and lost, than to never to have loved at all.
How can that be true? In the story The Gift of the Magi, written by O. Henry, Della and Jim are a young married couple. They were very poor.
Della had long beautiful hair and was just gorgeous. It was close to Christmas and she needed to get a gift to her husband Jim. She didn’t have a lot of money so she sold her hair so it could be made into a wig. She bought the most beautiful fob for his watch. When Christmas came she opened Jim’s gift and it was a set of combs but not any combs these were the nicest combs a girl could have. Then Jim opened her gift and it was the wonderful fob. She then asked to see the watch and see how it looked on it, see was stunned to hear Jim tell her that she sold it. The ironic twist of that story tells just how far one would go to make the other person feel the love that they have to each other.
The definition of love might of gotten blurred but the meaning of it is still there. Love is the one thing that is apart of our lives if we like it or not, It will find you even if you hid from it. Because of the diversity of people and diversity of love it can’t be defined or said and capture the true nature of love to all of us. The only way to capture the true meaning of love is to experience it and find out for yourself, what is love.
