Love In The Symposium

Love has many definitions, it can be seen as the deep, intense feeling of affection towards another individual, or it can be seen as having great interest in something whether it be a sport or any other activity. Love is the strongest emotion human possess, it causes people to do many irrational things, and it is the the only emotion in which almost every movie, play, or novel is about. In the Symposium love is described in many ways, heavenly and common, the search for one’s other half, the reason for extreme bravery, as a ghost, and even as a god. Throughout history nearly every advanced civilization focused someway or another on love, through marriage or through the plays performed for the masses, love had an impact almost every person. …show more content…
According to him, before there were just men and women there were other being called androgynous which were basically a man and a women joined with all the body parts of both. Men and women at the time that the androgynous roamed the earth were also two bodies in one but they were only males joined to male and females joined to females. These people that were joined together are what we would call “soul mates”, they were eachother perfect other half. The androgynous were so powerful that they made moves to take down the gods, Zeus was not pleased and can up with a solution, to split each person straight down the middle like cutting cheese with a wire. When these were split they became so distraught that they just hugged their other half and tried to form back together but Zeus had a better idea, he turned their genitals so that they pairs could mate as a way to express their love. It is said that when we find the person we marry nowadays it is our other half that we were split from. This speech by Aristophanes was an interesting one that is a good mythological explanation of love and finding our soulmates. I do not know whether to believe that this myth or true or not, it's not my place to bash other’s beliefs, but I do believe every person in this world has an other half that they need to discover. Romantic love is nothing more than the never ending desire to find that other person who completes you, it’s what makes us go through relationship after relationship searching for the one that makes you so filled with joy and love that you don't know how to act but you would do anything to make that person happy. The sad truth is that the vast majority of people never find their other half and settle with whoever will benefit them the most. Many people in other countries don’t even have a choice on who they marry or date, they are forced