The Harm in Misconceptions

An anonymous writer once wrote, “It’s bad manners to say I love you with a mouth full of lies”, yet a lot of people do. The denotation of love reads as an intense feeling of deep affection; however, people falsely believe that love meets certain criteria including giving gifts and calling their significant other terms of endearment. Based off of this idea, William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, is a story about two young teenagers from rivalling families who both have misconceptions about love. Until they meet each other, one thinks he is madly “in love” with someone else, while the other prepares for an arranged marriage set up by her family. After risking their lives to meet each other, chaos ensues and five days later several people end up hurt or dead. Romeo and Juliet shows that people should not have these misconceptions about love.

When it comes to love society has false ideas about the nature of love and its effects on people. The characters, Romeo and Juliet, believe in these irrational ideas such as the belief that people can love each other at first sight; however that is lust. From the beginning of the play, the chorus states that Romeo and Juliet are “star-crossed lovers” (Prologue 6-8). The term literally means two people whose love gets thwarted by fate, yet some people assume that these two people are in unconditional love by fitting into society’s ideas about that emotion. Because they aren’t based on the truths, these assumptions are faulty, foremost for the reason that base themselves on irrelevant, non-factual things. For example, in Act One Scene One, Romeo’s depression about “love” shines through when he says, “She will not stay the siege of loving terms, / Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes, /...

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...o dead and Juliet, dead before, / Warm and new killed.” (V.iii.202-204) By analyzing why these people actually died, it becomes evident that Romeo’s death was caused by his belief that he should do anything in his power to be with the person he loves, even if it meant joining Juliet in the afterlife. Because it has been proven that he doesn’t love her, his dead was caused by his very own misconception about love which could have easily been avoided. As these actions show, people should not be misled into believing that society’s ideas about love are true.

This Shakespeare’s play shows that people who have misconceptions about love, often based off of society’s ideas, end up depressed or harmed in some way. In essence, Shakespeare indicates that people should evaluate what it means to be in love instead of being misled by what other people think it should be like.