Rilke On Love

5 Pages 1227 Words

“Youthful Ignorance”
“Marriage is a new task and a new seriousness -- a new challenge to and questioning of the strength and generosity of each partner and a great new danger for both.” With this definition marriage is presented as a business deal. However, marriage is not just two random people assigned to each other, instead it involves a connection between the two people called love. Since many people fall into and out of love it is difficult to define what love actually is. Rilke explains what an ideal love relationship is, different errors young people make, and ways to correct them. His views on love and relationships are debatable and can be seen as both correct and incorrect.
The error that young people often make with relationships is that young people jump into relationships to early. Young people do this because of several reasons: they are impatience, they possess what seems like an uncontrollable sex drive, and they have a social convention that makes them feel it necessary to have a significant other. Yet the problem lies not with their want for a relationship, because relationships are possible, rather in the way the youth throw themselves at the other person, abandoning their individuality to form a perfect, but unattainable, union.
Rilke explains that impatience is a cause for a bad relationship. He says, “ But young people who love each other fling themselves with the impatience and haste of their passion.” The two people do not truly know or respect each other. Instead they rush into a relationship and form a union with somebody that could be a complete opposite of what the other partner is looking for. When they do this both people compromise their values, beliefs, or way of life in order to keep the bond they share together. Therefore, they lose the individuality that once made them unique and special.
Another cause for the error in young peoples relationships is a sex drive that they s...