Reading Lolita In Tehran By Barbara Fredrickson

In both, Barbara Fredrickson’s, “Love 2.0” and Azar Nafisi’s, “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” there is an overlap on the themes of small moments and identity. In “Love 2.0,” Barbara Fredrickson introduces scientific analyses of the brain’s response to positive connections. The unfamiliar standpoint about how love is “forever renewable” (108) and how “[it is] not unconditional” (108) refines how love is interpreted and perceived. Fredrickson presents an ongoing juxtaposition from both ends of love and strongly states how love is “forever renewable” (108). In “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Azar Nafisi illustrates her class meeting with her girls, who are driven to learn about the relation between fantasy and reality. She reveals the emotions and enhances

In these small moments, we have an opportunity to experience what we desire and what allows us to be free and expressive. As Barbara Fredrickson says it, when experiencing micro-moments of love, the system also includes “— your physical health, your social bonds, your personality traits, and your resilience. Having assets like these certainly make life easier and more satisfying” (120). Such resources help build your identity and they help stabilize these small moments for the time period they tend to last. In addition, Azar Nafisi highlights her reaction to the girls’ satisfactions when she states, “almost every Thursday morning… almost every time, I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color” (281). To be satisfied is to simply fulfill desires and each girl that Nafisi introduces and reveals her personality uniquely in the living room. The words “shed” and “burst” have so much strength embedded in them and to go against the social norms and mandatory rules, is how the girls experience adequate pleasure. Moreover, the constant theme of oppression and the perception of the way women are seen in society as they are always living in the shadows of men is what allows these small encounters to have a really strong effect. The oppression and the unequal treatment of women, especially in this Islamic society, crush their true potential to express themselves. The segregation that happens in buses and the way they are required to dress is indirectly the form of restriction that men pose on women. Barbara Fredrickson claims that “when you truly connect with someone else over positivity… you become attuned, with genuine care and concern for the other” (113), however since the girls were not allowed to interact with the men and be expressive about how they feel outside the