The Two Faces of Love in Greek Mythology

Why are we always willing to do anything for love? Sometimes, we even hurt ourselves for it. Is love meant to be all-consuming?

"They say love's all for show but for you, I would die in secret", "For you, I would ruin myself a million little times,". The following are excerpts from Taylor Swift's songs. But we often resonate so much with this kind of lyrics. Why are we always willing to do anything for love? Sometimes, we even hurt ourselves for it. Is love meant to be all-consuming? Is it meant to make one so insane, enough to lose thyself? Or is it just within the nature of being in love to be sacrificial? To move mountains, to fight wars, and conquer death for it? Turns out, it's not just in modern pop culture and literature that we see these embodiments of love. It's in Greek mythology too. And if this is how myths and ancient beliefs have portrayed love for us, what makes our universal concept of love?

Pyramus and Thisbe loved each other despite them being forbidden to do so. In the end, they both killed themselves to be with each other, very much similar to Romeo and Juliet. Perhaps, the saddest love story of all was Orpheus who traveled to the underworld to reclaim his dead wife. But towards the end, he broke Persephone and Pluto's one simple rule to never looked back as he ascends into the real world. He once again lost Eurydice just when he was so close to reclaiming her. Because of this, he lived his whole life in despair and never forgot Eurydice. Cupid, on the other hand, was not able to follow his mother, Venus' command to kill Psyche because he fell in love with her. Psyche did all of Venus' challenges just to be with Cupid.

Similar to these representations of love in Greek myth, sometimes, love becomes all too consuming. We burn and we die for it every day, we ruin ourselves a million times for it. This is because when we love someone so much, we lose ourselves in the process. When you love someone so much, your world revolves around them. They complete you, and so when you lose them, there's nothing left of you too. When its flames have died, it's either we perish with it or we burn in torment every day.

Sometimes, love is simply just sacrificial. It's putting your walls down for someone. It's fighting against all odds for someone. Like Pyramus and Thisbe, even when it is forbidden, we fight for it. We go through the ends of the world for it, we fight until we feel like we can no longer fight, but the love itself keeps us going. Like Cupid for Psyche, we change for it. We forget the bad things that we are, and we become better for it. Like Psyche for Cupid, we would do all things that it takes to keep that love. Like Orpheus for Eurydice, we try and we try to have it for a lifetime, and if we once lose it, we fight for a second chance because a love that's true is a love worth fighting for. But like Orpheus and Eurydice too, true love is also letting go when we have to.

I'd like to think that Greek mythology paints us the two faces of love: it's either intoxicating to the point of killing each for it, or it's sacrificial. But what I am sure of, the right love is the one that need not feel so hard. It's sacrificial, but it should not be intoxicating. I think sometimes, we get blinded by the over romanticization of love in literature. But in the real world, we don't need a love that hurts us. What is not mostly known about it is that love doesn't have to be so complicated. Perhaps, it only needed to be the simplest thing in the already complex world. It's peace in chaos. It's going anywhere and ending at home to someone. It's Orpheus to Eurydice. It's sacrificing when we have to, fighting because it's worth fighting for, letting go when we have to, and when it's over, we remember because a love so great is worth remembering.