The greatest thing you will ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. That line is repeated frequently through the film Moulin Rouge, and it, at first puzzled me very much. The first part seems to make perfect sense to love is definitely something you must learn to do, but the second half caused me some confusion. How can a person learn to be loved? This idea of learning to be loved did not appear first in Moulin Rouge, before that it was found in the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast. The Beast did not just have to learn how to love another but he had to learn to be loved by another.
After a serious amount of thinking I realized how true that statement is. It is often so easy to love other people, there are so many good things that they have done to make you love them but how could they love you? You know yourself, the mistakes you have made, the thoughts you have thought, and the things you have said. How could anyone love someone so imperfect and mean? But we forget that they too are imperfect. That is learning to be loved, it is realizing that you can be loved. And how important that is, we could of course just live unloved and alone and be perfectly fine. But could we really? We must learn to be loved so we can learn to love ourselves. Being unloved can sometimes lead to some seriously amazing artwork or angry music but that high quality of artwork is more easily repeated when there are people who care to see it. Alright maybe that seems a little too "awe cute, love can fix anything," but that is not how it was meant. Love cannot fix any problem it will not be able stop every misguided person in this world from committing the crimes they might want to commit, but it can make those crimes seem insignificant to those hurt by them.