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Unrequited Love

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Submitted By jsavelio
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Good morning/afternoon everyone. I’m Jaye and I’m an undergraduate student studying sociology at UQ. My job here today is to talk to you about the comprehensive topic of love and in particular unrequited love in the 21st century. Love in all its splendour is complex. No one could ever doubt that the most empowering emotion is to be in love. To be embraced, accepted and wanted but with being in love comes the emotional risk that the person you want to spend the rest of your life with might not want the same. When that happens love is often conflicted with pain, suffering, and jealousy which are all second-hand emotions of love. So how exactly do you deal with loving someone who doesn’t love you back? Why is it so hard to get over it and come to grips with reality? What’s preventing us from healing from such a deep wound, knowing the pain can often be unbearable?
Love hurts. Love stinks. Love is blind. At some point in life, we’ve all experienced the pain poets and songwriters have written about for ages. Usually, it’s because we’ve loved someone who hasn’t loved us back. Feeling so emotionally invested in something we’re being told doesn’t even exist is often the most excruciating pain.. Yet we endure it. Why is that? The purpose of this seminar is to investigate the connection between love and pain from before the year 2000 up until today. Three texts will be explored and used as examples to investigate the power of unrequited love and its second hand emotions. These are 500 days of summer (2009) written by Scott Neustadter, Directed by Marc Webb, Someone like you (2011) written and sung by Adele and New Moon (2009) a novel written by Stephanie Meyer.
Many people consider 500 days of summer to be one of the greatest modern love movies, but it’s not. The narrator warns us very early on, as if not to get our hopes up, that this is not a love story… but it’s a story

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