Love Defines Who We Are

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How we identify ourselves and fairytales have a major thing in common: love. Fairytales consecutively have the similar plot: love at first sight, a tragedy transpires, then discovering a way to reunite with each other, and finally ending with a happily ever after. Everyone has one aspiration in common: to find their “prince charming” or “princess” with who they will spend the rest of their lives with; hopefully with a joyful ending. It is difficult to identify the self since numerous elements influence it; however, a major influence over the self is love. In Sonnet 138, “When my love swears that she is made of truth,” Shakespeare uses a poet as the speaker and his mistress as the audience to convey the view that although not everyone claims to fall in love, it defines the self by permitting us to lie to ourselves about who we are, thus creating an illusion.
In the content of Sonnet 138, the poet exposes both the nature of his relationship with his sweetheart and the uncertainties he has about growing mature, ultimately, leading him to adjust the self accordingly to his lover’s ideals. The poet, or speaker, is a hopeless romantic who believes “O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust” implying the finest love is one that forgives and pretends as though everything is fine (line 11). Due to this standpoint, he exonerated his mistress for all the wrong that she has committed. He could not forgive her unless he changed himself, by altering his values. Based on the poet’s passion in describing her, she is a beautiful, youthful woman who does not want to end up alone. The speaker has a preconceived idea that intimacy makes everything flawless, when it is simply an illusion to wear a mask to hide the reality of who we truly are.
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...t will always become a negative influence. Since people do not want to end up alone, they allow for “[their] faults by lies flatter[ed] be” meaning they let lies help them to forget about their faults (line 14). Society has influenced us into believing that when we fall in love we should feel butterflies in our stomach, visualize fireworks when we kiss, and filled with massive happiness. Thus, love being the best thing that will ever occur for us. Sonnet 138 portrays affection as completely the opposite by expressing to us that our idea of affection is simply a deception. In reality, in order to be blissful you must become accustomed to a life purely filled with lies. We are willing to adjust who we are in order to maintain that feeling of affection even if we know that it is nothing but a mere misconception made up of distinctive masks that conceal who we truly are.

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