Everyday Canvas

Love and Anger

Prompt: "When love is given, love should be returned, anger gives no life." Hawaiian Proverbs Do you agree?

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I don’t agree with the “love should be returned” part. Love is not a duty. If love is given, it is a gift. That’s that. There are no shoulds to it. You don’t have to return anything back. It is ridiculous to expect someone you love to love you back. True love has no conditions put on it. Obviously, love is not well understood in Hawaii or not understood like the way I understand it, even if I am neither an expert nor a proclaimed success on the subject.

Besides, this type of an expectation is a dangerous concept, as it leads to becoming an obsession and ends up in stalking and bothering the loved one. Would a true lover want to bother or scare the one he or she loves? I think not.

As to “anger gives no life,”---if I understand it correctly from this quite bad translation which doesn’t pay attention to the implied meaning—the feeling of anger is an emotion and emotions cannot be helped to be felt, but how we act on our feelings, especially where anger is concerned, is the key here. Acting rashly and impulsively with anger ruins a person’s health and possibly his life, not to mention that the acts he may commit may put him behind bars or worse.