Does love actually real?
I just reflected over it because I just finished Stoner, and the relationship he had with Edith was so fucking lame but seemed realistic, that I'm wondering how much of it is analogous to modern relationships.
If it is, than love literally doesn't exist.
>does love actually real
what did he mean by this?
did you really read the book, cause theirs that whole bit where he does nothing but rawdog that cutie.
Love is just a societal anchor. Without anchors it's harder to control the public. Love and the things that come with it (kids, fashion, housing, cars, food, ect) make it easier to maintain power over the commoners. The idea of someone wanting to spend their entire lives with you sounds like an amazing thing, but it's false.
Love is the greatest con on mankind.
>Does love actually real?
Is it not obvious? Do you not feel it?
If not, then I feel very sorry for you.
my mom's from a third world country.
love is very real there.
Here in America things are very different. I think love has a very hard time cultivating in this environment.
I remember when I was going through puberty
>Love is just a societal anchor.
So it's about as real as any other socially constructed myth like culture then.
Yes, but is infatuation synonymous with love? It's clear that in the book, he is infatuated with her, but later on in the book it's also clear that was just a phase, and that they never should've married in the first place.
>this thread
>did you really read the book, cause theirs that whole bit where he does nothing but rawdog that cutie.
Yeah, and "that cutie" isn't his wife, and tbqh, it's possible to fuck someone for a very long time without being in love with them.
I've never felt anything even remotely close to love for any of the cuties I've rawdogged.
I wouldn't use one relationship to judge every other relationship on earth. Stoner and Edith's relationship was unique.
I've been expecting to learn its all a farce for years now, but best I can tell my parents and grandparents really do love each other the way we mean when we talk about a decades-long marriage.
>Stoner and Edith's relationship was unique.
How so?
This is bait.
I think her "love" is an arranged marriage my dude
>Stoner and Edith's relationship was unique
How can you miss the point of the book THAT FUCKING BAD?!
>but best I can tell my parents and grandparents really do love each other the way we mean when we talk about a decades-long marriage.
How do you know that though? They could be keeping up appearances, and secretly fucking other people.
>loveless marriage
>unique
it's crushingly believable and logically sets up Katherine
You can love someone without fucking them, or while fucking other people, or while being sexually exclusive with them
Sometimes the fact that everyone here is a sheltered loser who is afraid of being alive really shines through
You're the one who focused on the sex part. They could also be keeping up appearances because they don't want to split up the family.
...
nice meme
>they could be fucking other people
>You're the one who focused on the sex part
Most of the posts ITT have a sexual element
Not my original post in the OP though. I was asking what love actually is, because the relationship between Edith and Stoner in the book seems very plausible in the real world, given our 50%+ divorce rate.
Yeah, but what about Katherine? Wasn't that love?
I think Williams was, more than anything, painting a portrait of a man who has been swayed into an incredibly bland and painful life. Katherine was the one spot of true love within the book.
It really does makes living worthwhile. Your ambitions can change or fade, your living standards can drop, your health might begin to fail, but knowing there is someone who loves you is like being thrown a life ring when you're struggling to keep afloat in troubled water. My girlfriend has lived a fairly comfortable, sheltered and studious life. She knows I've suffered a lot with my family and with my introversion and so on, but she appreciates my willingness to treat her as more than just a cute fragile girl and in turn she provides for me the caring and tenderness I have gone without. We are good friends as well as lovers, and we make sure via small gestures (kissing in passing, spontaneous intercourse, gifts without occasion) that our love is mutual and consistent. I look back on how I was just three months ago and it feels like a different era of my life. I thought I would never experience love and my pessimistic view of life and defensiveness was so illogical in retrospect. I realize love doesn't last forever all the time, and that one day one of us may lost interest in the other, but to have someone you respect and long for express their excitement at the fact you exist is just so beautiful. She makes my life beautiful.
>Yeah, but what about Katherine? Wasn't that love?
Was it? Seemed to me to very raw and physical passion, but the reality is that I don't really know what love is. People just use the word very flippantly without defining it.
I envy you so much.
I hope your relationship lasts forever.
In the same way everyone's relationship is unique. You're talking about two people with different early lives, different personalities, different goals. Just because two people are incapable of loving each other doesn't mean everyone is.
Literature isn't about mapping out an objective understanding of The Human Condition. A novel isn't meant to be one of Aesop's Fables. It's a singular experience, subject to the interpretation of a unique, individual mind.
Edith loved Stoner as best she was able. You must have noticed her intense aversion to physical intimacy, and her resentment of her father. She had been abused.
>Edith loved Stoner as best she was able. You must have noticed her intense aversion to physical intimacy, and her resentment of her father. She had been abused.
Sounds like conjecture to me, but even if you're right, the point I'm trying to get at is that there's probably several thousands of marriages in the real world that start out and end like that, and if stories about the human condition isn't really about the human condition, what is?
Don't get too invested user. Everything ends sooner than you think and often out of nowhere.
If you 'work' in academia you will have a miserable life. Case closed
Your account of love from the perspective of three months in a relationship is basically useless, no disrespect.
She wasn't abused - she was just not prepared for the world she was meant to be prepared for. That's like one of the central points of this book. Holy fuck it's like you guys don't even read - the central point of developing William and Edith's life is that it is expected that they, like every other marriage of their generation, and of generation past, will live like all of the others have. The point is that they were unable to live the life all of the others have because no one has really lived that life. It is a societal norm that doesn't really exist - it is a portrait of a realistic life.
Funny how everybody seems to think it's only Edith that was the problem in that relationship. Fucking Stoner is uselessly passive. He's no different to his own Father, quiet and accepting of his own fate. Had he not gone to college, he would have become his Father in that old house. The back of the book states that he marries the wrong woman, but it's probably also true that she married the wrong man.
I felt terrible for him that little Grace grew up to be a drunk slut.
God that was brutal.
Romanticized love doesn't exist, no.
Edith was a spiteful, vindictive, petty person that blamed Stoner. Stoner was infatuated and Edith was too spineless to say no. She transferred the blame that she felt should have been put on herself onto Stoner. Largely she was conditioned by her parents (and society as a whole) to more or less be an ornament. Both Stoner and Edith's failures are a lack of personal agency in their lives and how that plays out in their relationships.
Stoner's relationship with his student was unhealthy as well. She was a replacement for both his wife and his daughter and by extension his entire life.
A relationship is like having a copilot. You're both invested in each other's well being and willing to take care of one another as you would yourselves, while still being able to hold yourself up. It's vulnerability and trust and yeah it can be exasperating as fuck but at the same time it's very rewarding.
If you feel their relationship is unrealistic then you are surrounding yourself with some pretty toxic people my friend