Sonnet 116

So first of all, despite the prompt that I am responding to (the first one), I am not trying to disprove Shakespeare and “take away the power of everything he wrote”! I don’t think quite that highly of myself. However, In Sonnet 116 Shakespeare appears to say that love is not love unless it is unchanging and constant. I don’t know how literal Shakespeare is necessarily being here as I think you can give license for different degrees of how love could change or alter itself. I do agree with Shakespeare in the sense that real love doesn’t just end because bad things happen or because you learn different things about each other. But I would disagree with anyone who reads this sonnet to imply that real love is a love that never alters in any form.

I don’t think that love can survive if it stays as a literal “ever-fixed mark”. I think that love is fairly multi-faceted as are the people in any type of a relationship. You can’t expect a person to always stay the same and therefore you can’t expect your love for them to always be the same. But I don’t think that that takes away from the love you had/still have. For example, I can think of people that I was once really good friends with and because of changes in circumstances/locales we are not as close as we once were. But that doesn’t mean that our friendship then was not real nor does it mean that I do not still love them, albeit in a slightly different way.

Likewise in a relationship, things change and I think that that is something that you have to be prepared for. Furthermore, I don’t think that the alterations that can result in your relationship or love over time is a bad thing; I think it’s vital. In any relationship at some point in time someone is going to do something that will hurt the other person. A very literal reading of “alteration” in Sonnet 116 implies that if someone cheats on you that it’s not true love unless there is no alteration in your love for them. I think that is an extreme example but I think that there is no way that someone could move past that or other difficulties unless they worked through those issues and feelings which would require some alteration of their feelings. However, I think that if a couple could manage to get through something like unfaithfulness then they would find they had a better, albeit altered, relationship and a stronger love and appreciation for each other.

I just think that relationships are complicated and that the only way love can survive through the years is through working on them and altering (which isn’t necessarily lessening) the love and the relationship that you share together. If anything, I think that the reason we see so much divorce is this unrealistic expectation that if we have to reexamine our love or work on it then it means that there is something wrong when in reality I think that is the only way you can achieve a healthy relationship that will last a long time…. and I am done sounding like Dr. Phil.

I agree that real love doesn’t just end because of time, changes, or actions. But in reading Shakespeare’s sonnets it becomes clear the he also recognizes the complicated nature of love and the need for relationships and love to change over time and as people change. This is why I do not think that Shakespeare is advocating that a love that undergoes change is somehow false or a lesser type of love. In my opinion, it’s the only type of love that can survive.