Some say love makes the world go around. The most evident theme in a majority of stories is love in all its beauty, along with its shortcomings. “The Cheater’s Guide To Love” features a main character that struggles with finding love again after ruining his first. Similar, in “Love is Blind and Deaf,” the couple, Adam and Eve, ruin the peaceful love between themselves and constantly chases after what once was. In contrast, the short story “Leap” discovers the beautiful truth of love after witnessing a countless amount of suicides.
In these three pieces the characters and narrator come to terms with the beautiful and depressing truths of finding and losing eros and philos love. Succinctly, “The Cheater’s Guide To Love” is a self-narrated story about a man named Yunior struggling to cope with love and loss for five years. Specifically, Yunior finds the literally depressing effects of losing love. His problems arise when he is caught cheating on his fiance with an innumerable amount of women. Although he claims to have lost the love of his life, it is possible that he does not understand romantic love from the beginning.
It is unmistakable that he may only crave love in the form of the physical touch, eros love, causing him to find affection in many other women. This is also evident in other relationships when he pushes a woman away because there was no physical intimacy. Throughout the story he copes with other repercussions of losing love such as depression, and the inability to love again. There are twenty-three pages of an unfortunate series of events when finally on the last page Yunior sheds some hope for himself. He says, “… ecause you know in your lying cheater heart sometimes a start is all we ever get” (Diaz 24).
This happens when he rediscovers his “Doomsday Book” full of all the evidence of his cheating that his fiance compiled (Diaz 23). He concedes to his situation and writes a book about all his cheating. Yunior also realizes the intensity and lasting effects of cheating and losing the love of his life. He writes, “The half-life of love is forever” (Diaz 23). In this instance, he means that his love for his ex-fiance will last forever, possibly signifying that believes it is impossible to stop loving someone.
Throughout five tortuous years of his life Yunior’s character dynamically changes to realize the effects of losing such a great love. Similarly, Jonathan Foer stresses a romantic love using an upsetting situation in “Love is Blind and Deaf” to find the truth about success in love. He writes about the first and most simple couple, Adam and Eve. They each have their own deficiencies, but due to the other being deaf or blind they are unaware of those flaws. This creates an easy and happy relationship between the two.
As the story goes on, the more apples they eat the more aware they become of each other’s flaws, creating a distance between the two characters. They constantly fight and are unsettled in their relationship. Although impossible, they try to recreate their flaws trying to close “the canyon between them” (Foer 2). The couple realizes all they needed was peace in their relationship. Even God applauds them for being so close to the peace there was before their ignorance diminished. The two lovers had to ruin their peace in their agape love to fully accept the revelation of how great their love had been.
Juxtaposed, Brian Doyle transforms a desolate scene into a beautiful metaphor for love in his short story “Leap”. He begins the piece explaining the numerous amounts of people jumping from buildings, such an abundant amount that it creates a “pink mist” and kills a few pedestrians along with some firemen (Doyle). This experience was possibly inspired by the September 11th, 2001 attacks as this was published in February of 2002. By painting a gruesome picture of this event, Doyle is able to put extra emphasis on love. He comprehends the power of love through two jumpers who grab hands before throwing themselves off a building.
Instead of mourning for all the people dying, Doyle is unable to stop thinking about the strongly held hands. He explains that the only hope we have in this destructive and disastrous world is through love (Doyle). Not specifically romantic love, but philos love, the love of a brother and one another. He goes as far to say that “… love is the reason is why we are here,” underlining it as the meaning of life (Doyle). It is clear that this shocking and terrifying experience will burn the beauty of love in his brain forever. Doyle had to use a disparaging scene to fully illuminate the importance of a beautiful love.
All these stories connect the main theme of love and its picturesque or shattering events and emotions that come attached. While “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” and “Love is Blind and Deaf” focuses more on losing an agape or eros love, and “Leap” focuses on philos love. With their different types of love, each story concentrates on the importance of it and the impacts of losing that love. Is it true that love makes the world go around? Each of these stories makes it clear that love is what connects people around the world and is impossible to live a life without.
