It has long been debated whether love is a feeling or a choice. That is, whether love will simply crumble over time and stress or whether two people can keep it alive if they are willing to look for the things that made them fall in love in the first place, even when those things aren't always easy to see. Poets of love poetry commonly say that love is a feeling, and Sappho, a poet of ancient Greece, is no different. I believe that Sappho writes about love as passion because her poems rarely consist of long-standing relationships, the love mentioned in the poems is commonly an all-consuming infatuation, and the characters mentioned in the poems are often negatively affected by the infatuation. When asked whether love is a passion or passion, this is demonstrated in Sappho's poems because her characters are often negatively affected by the love or infatuation that the poems are about. In poem 94 the speaker states, “I simply want to be dead,” because the woman he loves is leaving (Sappho 641). This presents how romantic feelings in Sappho's poems often negatively affect her characters because the speaker of this poem is suicidal after the aforementioned romantic relationship ends. The speaker is dominated by his emotions and is overwhelmed by grief when the two partners are unable to work together and save the relationship. While it is not unusual to feel depressed after the end of a relationship, the degree of unhappiness the speaker feels is directly linked to the intense infatuation he had with his partner. The speaker is not the only character affected, and this is shown in poem 1 when Aphrodite tells Sappho what she will make the object of Sappho's affection do: "If she does not love, she will soon love / even reluctantly" (Sappho 638). The other woman mentioned in this poem will be forced to love someone she does not wish to love, which will affect her negatively because she is forced to do something against her will. This reveals that his love is not a choice, but a passion imposed by a god. The characters in Sappho's poems are often negatively affected by the love mentioned in the poems and feel those negative emotions a lot.