LOVE LOVE LOVE

As mentioned by Margaret and Charlotte, the women in “Ramanyan,” “As You Like It,” and many other popular tales, there is a few common molds that most of the women fit into. Whether they are “loyal, weak, foolish, [or] clever” (Margaret Clemens), they somehow fit into the one of the general categories. In “As You Like It,” Rosalind plays quite an interesting role as she poses “as Ganymede” (1078) and “talks at length with Orlando about his true love” (1078) who happens to be her. Believing that the person who he is talking to really is a man, Ganymede, Orlando pours his heart out and ponders the idea of professing his love to Rosalinda. I think this interaction touches on a very prevalent and problematic part of society: the inability to honestly and openly express ones feelings.

Just as Orlando first confided in “Ganymede,” many men and women in today’s society are unwilling and unable to bluntly demonstrate their true emotions. I will bring this is a little to a personal level. A very close friend of mine, we shall call her Hope (short for hopelessly-head-over-heels), is and has been completely infatuated with my other friend, Not (short for Not-really-interested). We all met early in the year and our friendship started to grow. Living in the same hall, it wasn’t long before we were spending lots of time together and truly bonding. In the meantime, Hope and I had become best friends. We connected and found ourselves spending hours and hours a day together. As hope and I were getting closer, Hope was also getting a lot closer to Not. It was then that she started telling me how “adorable” he was and “so funny and smart.” To her he “was superb in the pearl light, lustful and proud…glorying in the night” (1044). This persisted for weeks on end, and is in fact, still persisting. Anyway, they began spending lots of time together, sitting in the study room till ungodly hours doing nothing but pretending to study while constantly finding ways to flirt with each other.

Now, you would think that after weeks and weeks of this, it would condense into something and a deeper relationship would begin to form. Wrong. You could say I served as the diary, Hope pouring her thoughts and emotions onto my pages, telling me everything that she didn’t want anyone else to know about her feelings for this special boy. In an attempt to stop this madness, the inability for her to simply tell him of the feelings she was having or vice versa, I decided to consult Not’s roommate, Ins (short for knowing-the-inside-story). Nonchalantly, I questioned Ins about Not’s feelings, expressing my shock at the amount of time the two them spent together. Ins quickly dismissed my observation that a relationship may be in he works with the statement, “No, he doesn’t like her. I am 100% sure. He doesn’t think she’s pretty enough for him.” I was completely taken aback. How could Not spend this much time with Hope, his actions practically proclaiming that he was interested in her, to then have absolutely no intention of pursuing anything?

I didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, I saw how much Hope liked Not and I didn’t want to break her heart but telling her of the news I had heard. But on the other hand, I wanted to spare her weeks and weeks and hours and hours of time she would spend with him in hope of becoming something more. What if Ins was wrong? What if Not just didn’t tell Ins his real feelings? There was no way to be sure…unless of course Not was honest and open about his feelings. Which leads me back to the initial problem, the inability to express emotions.

Had the two been open about intentions from the beginning, I would currently not be spending hours each night listening to Hope tell me all of the cute things Not did that day, Hope may have met a nice, new boy and been more open to getting to know him, and we would all be getting to bed much, much earlier.

Brigham Young once said that “Honest hearts produce honest actions.”
Perhaps Not truly does care about Hope, justifying the time he spends with her. Or perhaps his actions are dishonest and deep down, he wants nothing more than a friendship. Whatever the case, the situation would be far less complicated if we could speak honestly to one another and convey our feelings outside of the cloud that seems to define relationships. Once we can do that, we will find our time is spent much more wisely and we will be truly happy.