This is an
article close to my heart since it is about a Slovak/American couple. What do you think about America’s policy
that a pair must prove their love for each other in order to immigrate? What do you think about this couple's response? Could the machine that they have
invented work, or is it impossible to quantify love? Are long distance relationships sustainable? How much can Skype help?
It is important to say that America's policy, talking about the fact that a pair must prove their love for each other in order to immigrate, is a completely useless idea. Firstly, the feeling of love is usually between two people. Of course there are some exceptions, however, a woman and a man were made to make love. I do not think that anyone should care about them but the couple itself. It is up to them whether they love each other or not. When they want to live together, what a stupid idea is it that they are supposed to prove their love to somebody else. Secondly, the question is, what is love? Vakula asked in an interview, what the criteria are for this. And he is right. Is it when your partner buys you an expensive car? Or when you are hugged? Well, the answers will never be the same. And this is why improving love is a big trouble. For every single person the word love means something else. A proof of love is not every time the same, because everybody is different. When I give my boyfriend a certain kind of a hug, he knows I really appreciate what he did. He simply feels it. On the contrary, when a random person sees us hugging each other, he could think we are just friends. And this is the point. When I love somebody, he should be the one who knows and especially feels it, not someone whose job is solving murders. Moreover, I think nobody and nothing can measure the feelings of love. According to Vakula, the love machine measures heartbeats of the couple and measures their love. Actually, I do not agree with this machine. Beating of our heart is different every time. Even when you are in love with somebody, you may feel a bit sad because you cannot spend next weekend together or, on the other hand, you can be extremely happy because you have just been asked to marry the person. I simply think that heartbeats do not show the intensity of love every time.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, talking about the policy, this makes the people think about what their love means for them. It is a kind of a challenge. They are said to do hard things sometimes, such as being separated and trying to find a proper solution to prove their love. Matej would agree with this statement. In my opinion, only being in a relationship for such a long time, even when they were separated, is a sign of endless love of Ashley and Matej. From my personal experience, people break up when they are supposed to have long distance relationships. It is very hard to be with someone who is so far that he cannot even kiss you once per two months. For me it is easier to forget about the person and even social networks like Facebook or Skype are not enough. However, as I said before, everybody is different and there are many couples in the world which have a sustainable relationships even when they see each other only once a month. And this the couple, Ashley and Matej, who should get an applause. Despite the fact they had to be separated for such a long time, they did it and their love did not change in a bad direction. They have done the maximum they could and they have literally done everything for their love. And in their case, mainly Skype was a kind of a "sustainer" of their relationship. So yes, Skype has done a lot for this case.
To conclude it, if I was in their position, I would probably do the same thing. It means to try every option to show an officer that I love my boy even if I did not agree that the machine works. It would be enough for me if the officer believed it.
The first thing to say, I definitely agree with Anet, that it is kind of nonsense to prove your love if you want to immigrate. I think there should be no proof required. Secondly, I did not understand the meaning or usage of those sentences „The feeling of love is usually between two people. Of course there are some exceptions. “Are there normally couples composed of two men and a woman or two women and a man? I do not think so. There might be a few cases when it is a vicious triangle, or square or whatever else, depending on the amount of people, but there are mostly two-person couples. Furthermore, I have to agree with both Anet and Mr.Vakula, there are no criteria for love and everybody explains love in a different way. However I must admit that there is something truly about the heart beat. For my person experience, every time I was about to see my girlfriend, the closer that moment was, the stronger my heart beat. Although as Anet said, it does not necessarily have to show the intensity, but there our hearts beat in a different way when we are with our spouse. There is another statement of Anet I totally disagree with. She says that people would rather break up then have a long-distance relationship. If we love a person indefinitely as we definitely told him/her, breaking up will not be as easy as it may seem to be. There are more challenging cases than just be without someone you love for a period of time. You can overcome it, and if you are talking to the person everyday on Skype and you are interested in him/her, it might be even more converging than if you were together. Moreover, you start to appreciate your relationship more after such experience. Of course, you would miss the person, but as soon as she/he comes back, it will have great consequences.
DeleteIn my opinion, people should not be forced to prove their love with some machines nor anything else, because it is a personal thing. Also, people should appreciate their relationships, and even if there are upcoming some difficulties such as going abroad for a period of time, they should not break up, but be even more caring.
Dominik Bolerác
The article showed how to deal with the bureaucratic requirements the government prepared for us and revealed me many problems young international couple has to manage to be able to live together and ways to survive the difficult part of life separately.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, just the idea of a machine that can measure love interested me. I have not believed there would ever be a device that could express the measurement of love or feeling the human can have toward the other person. In spite of the artistic measurer of love, I still find improbable that the science could discover this type of machine. Although the feeling of love is the result of chemical processes in our heads affected by different senses, for instance the smell, which can affect the attraction toward the person, according to my opinion, love would not be full of questions if the only problem were to solve a chemical equation. However, I would be pleased to experience the machine Clark and Vakula created since I cannot imagine how much love I can feel toward my boyfriend according to this machine and whether it could reveal who loves more in the relationship.
Although the machine is only an artistic creation not scientifically proved, circumstances under which it was created brought the question how difficult the process of proving love can be. I understand the bureaucracy is required due to cases of fake marriages and obtaining green cards in the USA, as was mentioned in the article. Nevertheless, the process of proving love can be destructing for the common people who truly love each other. Moreover, the fact that officers did not pay much attention to the photos the couple had provided indicates cases are not supervised properly. Therefore the real fake marriages do not have to be revealed despite the problems the common couples must undergo, including the long-lasting separation Clark with Vakula had to deal with.
As Vakula claimed:“The situation of not being able to be together really deeply influenced us. Ashley was crying a lot, almost every day. It was very hard for our mental health.” To survive a long lasting separation and the distance can be almost heart-breaking, Clark and Vakula are a good example for those who do not believe it is possible to master it. I am, personally, one of those nonbelievers, since the Internet or even Skype, which the couple used, is not able to replace the physical contact with the partner that I consider most important. Except for the physical contact, the fear that the partner will find somebody else can sooner or later becomes a demon that can end up in break up. Therefore the trust and expressing the love in different ways, not only for the government, but mainly for themselves, can save the relationship, develop the strong bond, even create amazing artistic masterpieces, for example paintings depicting Skype screenshots as Clark and Vakula created, or write classic letters as a proof of your eternal love.
Firstly, I have the same opinion about the machine that can measure love as Lucka has. I doubt there is something that can measure love or in general feelings. Feelings are unexplored and full of questions even for the best scientists in the world so I am sure it is impossible to quantify or enumerate them. On the other hand, the way the couple react to the measurement and the behaviour they have before, during and after the process of measuring can tell us, at least, something about their love. So, in my opinion, the machine is not useless at all.
DeleteOn the other hand, I agree with Lucka about long-distance relationships. In my opinion, Skype, Facebook and, in general, social networks are simply not enough to make the relationship work. It will never be able to replace the real contact in the relationship. I know there are couples (including Vakula and Clark) who are able to survive such a huge test, and personally I admire them, but I was probably not created for this type of relationship. In spite of the fact that couples having long-distance relationship have to go through horrible torture, I believe it can, in some ways, strengthen and support the relationship.
I consider the article a nice one, it shows how hard it has to be to immigrate to U. S. (it probably applies even to some other countries) with intention to get together with your spouse. However, I think that the “green card policy” works right and that the couple has benefited from the separation, but, in my opinion, there is a better solution to the fake marriage problems.
ReplyDeleteI think that a crush on somebody is easy to prove, but real love needs time. Personally, I do not consider the crush as real love, I find it temporary. It is mostly based on appearance attraction and chemistry; after some time it gets stable and there is the real love needed (by real love I mean the decision of both the individuals “to make themselves smaller”, to help each other that the other could blossom; and not changing their decision, not even in the hardest times). So if a country gave the green card to a couple not really loving each other, it is probable they would not stay together for very long, which could have a similar effect to that of fake marriages (the person would immigrate and if they got divorced after some time, the person could stay in the country). So if immigration officials wait, for instance, for three years as they did with Ashley and Matej, they will have the strength of the pair's love revealed (the pair will stay together or go their separate ways). So I would say it should be enough to document normal activities a pair do together throughout the whole separation time (again with the couple it was the art).
The period of separation of Matej and Ashley when they visited themselves only sixteen times mostly for one or two weeks had to make their relationship much stronger. On one hand, I believe it was hard experience full of crying, but, on the other, hard things build people. I think this could be easily compared to school tasks: “How difficult was it to write your first half-page letter for a language class? And how hard was it to write an essay during some high school testing? And how easy did the letters look like then?” Moreover, I think that the fact they had to communicate mostly over a long distance had to make them looking forward to seeing each other personally, at least more than a couple living in the same house does. In addition, it could have made them happier about the present when, at last, they are together. All in all, they have suffered together and supported each other. They were separated, but knew they have the partner to help them. I find it strong experience, which had to strengthen their marriage.
In spite of all the advantages, in my opinion, this problem with the people wanting to immigrate to a country by marrying someone has a better solution. They could allow the couple to live together in the country for a trial period. This would be beneficial for the officials, who could check the couple easier. For example, they could visit them unexpectedly from time to time and see whether they live as partners, whether they have some common interests or whether they know and are interested in each other. And if the state considered the couple as a fake one, the immigrant could be sent back to his home country. However, what I consider more important, the two people would be in personal contact. So it would be much easier for them (of course, on the assumption that they are not a fake pair). They could touch each other. There would be no difficulties with the time difference. And simply the suffering from the separation would disappear.
To conclude, according to my opinion, the couple was made stronger and the separation had to be a school of partner life for them. But it should have been made easier for them because I do not think they had to be put that barrier of long distance between them.
Firstly, I also think that there must be a better solution for the problem stated in the article, because I think that the fact that a couple has to wait months and months (in this example, almost 2 years) to be judged by an uncaring officer just to get to live with their loved one hinders the purpose of this agency quite a bit. Furthermore, I really like Alex´s idea about letting the couple live in the US and then having them regularly checked. However, I strongly disagree with the point Alex has stated in his first and second paragraph about proving and strengthening love. In my opinion, and surely in Matej´s and Ashley´s too, the green card policy is not working as intended absolutely at all. I do not think that it is in any way beneficial for a couple to undergo such a traumatizing experience as being two years without their loved one. Only with a few visits, relying on Skype, online connection and even managing the six hour time difference must have been real hell for them. Matej even had to be up until 1 am in the night! Tell him about strengthening relationships! This is an outrageous torture that I do not wish anyone, even my worst enemies, should ever experience.
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