Finding Love in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Love is a major theme in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. As a teenager and young woman, Janie has always been waiting for a love that is unknown to her. She only attains a glimpse of this love while looking up at the blossoms of a tree in her grandmother’s yard. Even though she yearns for this love, she marries a man that her grandmother had chosen for her. In searching for this love, she leaves her husband and follows a total stranger to a new town. Being young and innocent, she did not realize that what she had with Starks was not love until years later before his death. Ironically, only when she had given up on it, did this love come to her. The relationship and love that she and Tea Cake had was what she was searching for all along. However, as easy as it had entered her life, it also left without a warning. Surprisingly, she accepted Tea Cake’s death, and continued living her life. Her reaction and actions after having lost her lover confirms a truth in the saying, it is better to love than to have never loved at all.