This isn't at all what I meant to talk about today, but I read something recently that got me to thinking, and it would be sacrilege not to publish my every thought (that was sarcasm, btw). This is going to be short, and probably a bit aesthetically unappealing as I'm not going to bother finding a bunch of random, semi-related images to sprinkle around.
I just got finished reading a romance novel, and at one point the male romantic lead mentioned to the female romantic lead that, for at least one second, he thought he would be willing to let her die in order to spare her the pain of seeing him die. When MRL (I'm initializing) said this, my respect for him grew enormously.
I'm mostly talking about the Great Romantic Love today, the heroic love from romances and not real life. There seems to be a thought going around that this kind of love is completely selfless, where both romantic leads are willing to do anything in order to make their significant other happy, even risking their lives so that the other might survive. I gave it some thought a long time ago (and by 'a long time' I mean I think I was in Middle School), and I decided that I largely disagreed with this thought.
This came up again in High School, when we read Ayn Rand's Anthem for IB English in our Sophomore year. Ayn Rand, in case you don't know, created the philosophy of Objectivism, which essentially states that man's highest goal in life should be to obtain his own happiness. This idea, of course, chaffed with a lot of the students, though I found myself agreeing with it in at least some respects. Anthem itself was a sort of allegory used to explain Rand's philosophy.
A major part of the story is the fact that Equality, the name given to the main character by society, falls in love with a girl named Liberty, who he's not supposed to even know. A few students brought this up, wondering how he could be falling in love with someone if he's supposed to be thinking only about his own happiness, and our teacher tried to explain that the act of loving is mostly selfish, saying something to the effect of "he loves her because making her happy is something that makes him happy."
I completely understood that; when thinking about love and selfishness, my mind is almost always drawn to think about the obligatory 'dying in order to save your lover's life' scene in most heroic romances. The hero of the scene, helplessly in love with the main love interest of the fiction, would rather die than be forced to live in a world without him/her.
Which is nice until you consider that, by dying, the hero is forcing their significant other to do the very thing they (the hero) could not possibly stand to do. That's OK if the significant other didn't feel exactly the same way about our hero, but that's rarely the case in Great Heroic Romances. So, what; you can't bare to live with the misery of your significant other's death, but you don't mind is s/he had to live with that misery?
Sure, it sounds a bit narcissistic to assume your lover will be as broken up about your death as you would be about theirs, but essentially you're coming off as selfish either way.
This is something I've been thinking about; I just finished re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo earlier this week, which has a somewhat similar Great Romance subplot, and the life-for-a-life thing isn't rare in heroic fiction with romantic subplots. That's why, reading this other book, I really grew to respect the MRL, not just for all the awesome things he did in the story, but for being, at that moment, extremely selfless, wishing to spare the FRL more suffering (which kind of ended up being a major theme within the story).
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