When love turns bad

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice once wrote a tune called “Love Changes Everything”, celebrating its enormous power to transform. It certainly has that, but the outcome is not always as pleasurable as it is in the song. Many a romantic story has ended tragically because of that very power. 

The murder-suicide of two gay college stu

 dents early this week has shaken me. A failed reconciliation led to gunshots in broad daylight at a packed university. 

Thai Rath quoted a family relative as saying that the gunman, who killed himself after shooting dead his ex-lover, was waspish and overbearing. But what was the real inner motivation? Corpses won’t explain, and I’m no detective, but I know it was the power of love.

A close friend of mine once dated a guy for more than five years. They finally broke up, and my friend told me in tears that he now no longer even heard from his old lover, despite his five years of devotion. My friend began seeing other men but had no success, and started to lose faith in love. He trusts in sex alone now, he says. His life needs no love – it’s too hurtful. 

I had heard that love could change even a tender person’s heart to stone, but when it happened to my friend, I was still quite shocked.

Almost invariably, people talk about love’s positive aspects, but sometimes in reality it inflicts serious damage. There are those who claim that the kind of love that hurts is not real love – it’s just lust or an eagerness to possess – but love is the root cause, isn’t it?

Love’s optimists know its enormous transcendent power and urge us, like Plato, to seize its benefits and avoid its shadows.

Regardless, love clearly consists of both good and bad, and we can never truly predict how it will shape our lives. We depart from a familiar place to seek out love, and let it drive us to do anything to have it. We expect love to be kind, and yet sometimes it brings only violence. Do we really understand this thing called “love?”