Love, everyone wants it, but few actually understand what it is and what it takes to obtain and maintain it. It’s quite sad that this powerful thing called love is so misused and misunderstood. It is one of those things that is subjective and open to interpretation, much like jokes. In the play The Clean House the characters show that love is not always easy and it does not always come without a price. “Love isn’t clean like that. It’s dirty. Like a good joke,” Matilde, Lane’s maid says. Sometimes jokes offend people and when that occurs they usually are not regarded as funny. Sometimes in love people get hurt and not everyone can win.
In life there are many actions that people may not like, but really those issues need to be addressed sooner rather than later. Like an offensive joke, if a joke offends someone it would be beneficial for that person to confront the joke teller sooner rather than later, because if they don’t those negative feelings might build and fester. Same goes with the expression of positive feelings, when someone hears a joke they immediately laugh. Like love it should be expressed when immediately felt, but often people hold back those feelings and don’t express them at moment they are felt. Real love should be expressed and not held back.
In the play Charles could not deny his draw to Ana and he did the right thing by clearing the air early on, “Lane I want us all to know each other. I want to do things right, from the beginning,” he states as he introduces his new love Ana to his wife. His love for Ana was not something he wasn't looking for and something he meant to do, but just by nature it happened and this time it was a different kind of love. “If a person was good enough, an equally good person would fall in love with that person. And then I met—Ana. Justice had nothing to do with it,” Charles said. There are many kinds of love making it “dirty” and complicated. The first kind he is talking about is the practical reasonable kind, the kind that makes sense. This is the kind that most people find. The second love he describes having with Ana is the extraordinary kind, the kind very few find and that is not driven by reason, but by an unexplainable force.
Just like many jokes people can get hurt. Lane is the butt of this joke when her husband decides to leave her for an older woman. She is the victim. “Poor Charles? Poor Ana? Poor me!” Lane says. In a way though, Lane understands her husband and why he and Ana did what they did. She must understand it if she is kind enough to care for Ana while she is dying. The reason why she helps Ana may be because she knows how much her husband loves her and she still loves her husband, so this is the only way she can she shows how much she cares for him. Perhaps Lane’s love for Charles is unconditional and this is why she is willing to do this for him, or maybe she wants to prove that she is good woman and the one to be had. For some people there is no way in hell that they would help their husband’s dying mistress. This is why love is regarded as dirty. While in love everyone performs differently, acts differently and all have their own meanings and interpretation of what love is—just like a joke love can be fun, funny, happy, successful, motivating, inspirational, or it can be miserable, sad, offensive, and difficult to understand. But clearly from everyone who has experienced real life “love is not clean.”
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