Feeling Love

Mark Berger
Mrs. Morais
English 101 Sec 012
February 1, 2010
Essay #1 First Draft: Feeling Love
What is love? How do we know when we actually find true love? These questions and many more about love have been getting asked since the start of time. Not all of these questions can ever get answered;because everyone has their own take on what it is and how to find it. Some people think that true love doesn’t even exist. Love is something that has been used as the main theme in many different books, movies, and music for as long as all of these things have existed. This is definitely the case in the short story “Man and Wife” by Katie Chase. It is a story about a nine-year-old girl named Mary Ellen. A businessman named Mr. Middleton, whom she only met once before at a party, asked her parents for Mary Ellen’s hand in marriage. Mary Ellen would go live with Mr. Middleton and take of him and when her parent’s were old and need to be taken care of, Mr. Middleton would do that for them. Her parent’s agreed to it and so at the young age of nine, Mary Ellen was about to become a wife. But is this really love? Even though Mary Ellen and Mr. Middleton get married, do they actually have true love for each other? In many places around the world, arranged marriages are just a part of society. In these places it isn’t unusual for young girls to be given away to marry older men. But, just because these people are married, I don’t think that they actually are in love. For me, true love is something that you can be forced into having. You need to work towards something as special and rare as love. Marriage is something that happens only when two adults are ready to spend the rest of their lives together. People can’t truly be happy in marriage without love. It would just be fake, and even though they might say they love each other, they aren’t sincere. In the story, Katie Chase makes it seem like this is actually what love is. That people can have true love even if it...