A Natural History of Love (3-12)

Summary
Love. Hard to define because love had many different meanings. There's a love between a girlfriend and her boyfriend, parental love, and love for material things. Love can bring the most sane people almost to the brink of insanity, it can make the toughest people become soft. Love can make the strongest people, become weak. It's a word that means so much, but is often used lightly. This book "A Natural History of Love" gives you the inside and out about love. It not only takes us to modern times but first it takes us, way back. I'm talking about Egypt, Greece, Rome, and even the middle ages. But first we take a trip to Egypt and learn about how they used and thought about love. First it talks about Cleopatra and her romance. Cleopatra was born in 69 B.C and was mainly Greek. she had everyman she wanted, and every men wanted her, they couldn't help it. One thing I really found interesting was that Cleopatra was married to Mark Anthony, and they had kids together. The book talks about their love and how she and Caesar had a history as well. Cleopatra's life was filled with everything she wanted, she was elegant, and wore the things. She was pretty pretty, it was the things she wore, the way she carried herself that made men follow her when she entered a room. Everyone thought that she was the best, but she had a lot of bad history. For instance, she killed her siblings in order to become queen, but Egyptians didn't seem to write about that kind of stuff. Then, the book talked about what Egyptians thought about love, and their idea can seem to be a bit sexual today. Egyptians expressed their love in many ways, and the most common was in music, dances, and poems. More frequently it was in love poems. Their poems are amazing and beautiful!

Quote
"Keeping our failings a secret, we assume no one on earth is as neurotic, no one as uniquely flawed. The rampantly beautiful person we are attracted to couldn't possibly be as frail. He is a contagion of virtues. Loving him, we sing his praises, highlighting all his good points. We redefine him to himself. Through love on learns to feel lovable" (Akerman 12).

Reaction
So far I found this book to be very very interesting. The whole definition of love keeps me thinking. I like the fact how the book talks about all the different love countries and romance time periods. The quote above is a way we feel when we love someone. It was talking about how were all imperfect and sometimes we find that the person we love have no flaws and that were the ones who have to work on things. The quote is saying that when we love someone we can't seem to find things that they need to work on, and that by loving them, by being in love, we learn to love ourselves and they learn to love us.