Great Love Stories

During our ill-fated road trip, I read "The Fault in Our Stars" by John Green. I am a big fan of John Green and this book definitely lives up to his other books. It was an excellent story and I highly recommend it. I am going to try to avoid any spoilers (to be said in a River Song voice), but basically it's a love story between two teenage cancer patients, so you can probably guess the gist of it. Anyway, it really made me think about the nature of great love stories. Did you ever notice that the best love stories always end with one or both of the lovers dying? I used to think that the reason for that was just that it was more emotionally intense that way, but I am beginning to believe that maybe the real reason is that killing one of the people is the only way to make their love last forever. In this book, there is a scene in which one of the characters refers to the other as "the great love of my life". It's a very beautiful and heartbreaking scene but, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if that was only the case because neither of them were likely to live long enough to have another love. I mean the one great love story that everyone always thinks of is Romeo and Juliet right? Well if you've actually read it you know that they barely knew each other and, at the beginning of the play, Romeo was half suicidal about some other girl who he was in love with but didn't love him back. Then, all of a sudden, he sees Juliet and decides that he is in love with her instead. My point is, if they hadn't killed themselves, they probably would have broken up in a week anyway, as tends to be the case with teenage romances (and most other romances for that matter). However, since they died they get to be the ultimate example of true love everlasting. I don't know, maybe I'm just a big cynical bitch.