Exploring the Complexity of Love and Happiness

The Four Letter Word

It’s the butterflies deep in your stomach, the smile that cannot leave, and the rapid heartbeat that pounds; it is love. This extremely complex, yet quite simple four letter word also carries around an innate feeling of happiness. The beginning of this deeply rooted connection between love and the idea of living “happily ever after” started as a child with the fairy tales I would read. Despite the fact that fairy tales and fables are fictitious, the components that make up “happily ever after” are actually scientifically proven to be true. According to a 75-year longitudinal study completed by Harvard researchers, “the key to a happy and fulfilled life, is indeed love” (Firestone). But does love automatically mean “happily ever after”? And can you achieve happiness without love? The complexity of love itself is in need of consideration. One must think about the definitions of love, whether it be love for oneself or the love for others, and how the singular and combined power of these emotional states can play a part in the pursuit of happiness. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, and George Eliot’s Silas Marner, the inquiry on whether happiness is determined by the love

Dalloway. Throughout the novel, there is a continuum of time passing as well as a continuum of going back into pass time. This yoyoing of time travel is influenced by flashbacks from an age of love, compassion, and happiness. Clarissa Dalloway, finds herself thinking about the past because that was when she was most happy. At her current state she does not receive the love from her husband, Richard, as she once thought she would many years back. To her, the memories of her summers flings and romances, still bring back the exact feelings she once experienced long before. One of her most memorable memories being the time Sally Seton kissed