Love is pain. This fact has been highlighted throughout history and continues to be highlighted today, particularly in pop love songs describing the pain the artist feels because of their love for someone. Love has often been described in tandem with negative emotions such as feelings of being out of control, feelings of sickness, feeling as though one is transfixed by love, pain. This authorial choice is one that has been around for thousands of years – from the letters between Abelard and Heloïse (and, perhaps, even earlier writings) to today. However, beyond all of this talk about love being a negative influence on people, there are also works that provide guidance on how to attain love. One of these is The Art of Love by the Roman poet Ovid. This goes to show that despite the writings throughout history depicting love as treacherous and likely to leave one with negative feelings, love is still something which people wish to obtain.
Many works throughout history have a particular theme in common--they all describe love as something which inflicts negative feelings upon the person who is in love. Those feelings can be feelings of loss of control, surrender, or loss of reason, such as in the letters between Abelard and Heloïse and the lays Equitan and Lanval by Marie de France, feelings of being wounded by love or being taken prisoner by love, as in Yvain (The Knight and the Lion), and feelings of actual physical sickness because of love, as in The Knight in the Panther Skin. All of these pieces describe the negative feelings associated with love in different ways, but they all agree on the idea that love often brings with it unpleasant emotions and, occasionally, actual ailments.
Yet despite all of the evidence that love should not be something people want because of the hurt and discomfort it brings, the characters in these texts also are willing to go to extreme ends for love. Heloïse strives to feel the love she once shared with Abelard, so she decides to reach out to him in a letter. In the lays Equitan and Lanval, the protagonists are unaware love has hampered their reasoning because they are focused on trying to attain the love they are chasing. A few lines after calling the love that Yvain felt a "wound", the narrator describes love as something that “had come to a home (Yvain’s heart) where [love] would be cherished, and [love] did well to stay.” Despite the wound caused by love, the feeling was welcomed and encouraged to stay within Yvain’s heart because it was something Yvain desired – he wanted to feel love for someone. In The Knight in the Panther Skin, love is described as something that causes one sickness, however, this sickness has a cure: the one for which that love is directed. Therefore, although love can mean sickness, it also can mean one has found a lover with which to weather these feelings of love and sickness. These examples describe how, even though negative feelings may appear to accompany love and therefore make it unattractive on the surface, they do not influence the way in which one welcomes and seeks out love. In other words, the negative feelings associated with love do not discourage one from desiring love.
But love isn’t all bad. In The Art of Love, Ovid acts as a “love coach” to the reader, providing them with helpful information on what to do in order to find love with a woman. In fact, in the beginning of Book I Part I of the Ars Amatoria, he explicitly mentions that anyone who does not “know the art of love” should read his work and, thus, “learn… how to love.” It is also interesting to note the word “art” used to describe love. Perhaps since Ovid is so knowledgeable about love that he is able to help others pursue it, he no longer finds love to be as negative an experience as it is commonly described, leading him to describe love as an art form rather than a foe or a sickness as other authors often do. From the very beginning of his work, he puts himself into a mentor role for the reader, assuming they are someone who wants to know the “art of love.” He goes on to describe how to find and “win” the woman whom the reader wants to love (Ovid, Book I Part IX, 136). The fact Ovid wrote a poem that directly mentions teaching love to someone who does not know it emphasizes the feeling of need surrounding this subject – people needed to know how to love because they wanted it so badly, negative repercussions and all.
This contrasts with the countless works throughout history that have depicted the emotions love gives to someone; pieces such as those mentioned previously, including the letters between Abelard and Heloïse, Marie de France's lays, Yvain (The Knight and the Lion), and The Knight in the Panther Skin. Not only do all of these provide context for how love is sought out, but, when combined with the description of Ovid as a love coach created out of necessity, they reveal how people seek out love and lovers despite the negative emotions they may find themselves feeling in the midst of love. Ovid takes a more direct route in presenting love as something people desire to obtain by describing himself as a mentor and providing tips, while the other pieces do so in a more nuanced way. The other pieces describe the negative feelings associated with love on the surface, but they also provide reasons why people would endure or have endured those feelings in the name of attaining love.
Love can be difficult because of the uncomfortable feelings that accompany it, but that does not mean people stop seeking out and desiring love. Clearly, feelings of sickness, being out of control, and being harmed by love do little to discourage lovers – these feelings have been documented and described for thousands of years. So if someone ever says they have butterflies in their stomach for someone, know that they are continuing a long history of feeling just a bit off thanks to love and its loyal comrade, consequences.
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