1.

The theme that I will present you today is « Meeting Others »

It’s about the relationship between people, and about their differents reactions based on their
personality.

2. For this theme, I choose to associate differents documents as : The curious incident of the dog in
the night time by Mark Haddon but also in a different style, the movie « Her », the netflix’s serie
Dear White People and the Poem of Emily Dickinson named I cannot live with you. These are four
really distants styles where there are differents relationship with other people because the characters
that are in the action of each stories didn’t have the same way to act with a stranger or even with a
known person.

3. Those differents documents can help us to answer to all the questions about the role of the
physical connection in love relationships and how do artists adress the question of the importance of
physical touch in a relationship ? We can also wonder in which ways can feelings be expressed and
how artists more specifically authors can describe it, is the physical touch essential in a
relationship ?

4. part1) They are differents reasons why a person would not feel the need to have physical contact
whith a person who he loves. For example, in the book The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the
Night Time, the main character is Christopher and he didn’t like to people to touch him because he
has Asperger’s syndrome so it’s difficult to him to be touched by other people, even his parents. « I
do not like people shouting at me. It makes me scared that they are going to hit me or touch me and
I do not know what is going to happen. » this is what Christopher wrote in his journal, later, he
explain that for him, just a little finger contact with his dad makes him safer « we do this because
sometimes, father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people, so we do this instead,
and it means that he loves me ». So for this book, love is possible to express without real physical
contact.

The second document is the movie Her in which a man, Theodore is falling in love with an
Artificial Intelligence named Samantha, so it’s impossible to him to have any contact with her.
Theodore is here obliged to do not have physical touch with Samantha so we can’t say that it’s a
choice but he certainly knows that before to fall in love with her. He can still show his love by
talking or writting with to her. The fact that there is no contact in their relationship is not avoiding
their sincerity. It’s the must intense relationship that Theodore ever had. He tells to Samantha « I
have never anyone as I love you » It’s certainly the 1st time that he has a relationship like this,
without any contact and even without seeing his lover.

Then, in the serie Dear White People, is an totally oposite way to show emotions. This serie
has been criticized because it is the adaptation of a movie but netflix makes it more in the codes of a
classical teen serie. In it, the physical part of love is the most important, almost every character just
show their love by kissing or more. Sometimes, it seems like the characters didn’t even take the
time to know each other before to hang out with them. Such as the relation of Coco and Troy who
have a totaly different way to see their future together, they even has been in a conflict in their
college because they both wanted to be president of the campus assembly. They stay together just
for sex and to be seen as a perfect couple.
 In the Poem of Emily Dickinson, there is really this romantic and soft way to express her
feelings and what she feels in her relationship. Here she is not showing how much she loves the
peron whose the poem is adress to, she is writting more like a a farewell letter, but she is not at all
talking about physical love or physical hate neither. It’s a separation, they can’t love each other
anymore, she mentioned a physical separation where they physicly can’t be together anymore she
writtes « So we must meet appart/ You there I here/With just the Door ajar ». Maybe is it to intimate
for the time to express physical desire because this poem was published in 1890 so maybe with
time, physical takes a bigger place in love relationships.
This poem is about platonic love where love is just about feelings and not about physical touch.
Emily Dickinson was a romantic poetess so it’s normal for her to writte about platonic love.
She describes an impossible love where the two lovers can’t be together, they are separated and
can’t see or touch each other.

In conclusion, we can’t say that with time, relationship became more center on physical touch
because The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and Her show us that people can love
without physical touch even in our actual society. In contrary, some other poeple like in « DWP »
are phocalized on the appearence and not on the personnalities.
SO no, physical contact is not essential in love relationship or in friendship but it can be a very
important part in a relationship. But people are really differents and didn’t want the same thongs in
theirs relations.
Writter show us that we can express feelings by many differents ways as : saying or writting down
what we feel directly to the person who we want to tell this. Communication is key in the majorities
of the relations. Emily Dickinson and Spike Jonze who is the scriptwriter of the movie Her, make
us see that it is also possible to love a person without seeing her. So we can say that today, there is a
lot of differents possiblities for artists to create a relationship and to describe it. As much as it exist
a lot of differents relationship in our world.
Of course, at the romantic period, platonic love or really soft contact was the only way for artists to
express love but now, platonic love can always beeing used.
In my opinion, relationships based on ohysical touch are seems like fake relations with two person
who didn’t really like each other but platonic love didn’t mean honest love.