With the current divorce rate at 40 to 50 percent, it is evident that love is subject to the effects of time. Both Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” stress the effect that time has on love, although they do so in very different ways. Shakespeare presents the ideal form of love: timeless, unconditional, and unchanging; Marvell presents a more realistic idea about love, with time being a condition through which one’s feelings may not prevail. Marvell produces a more convincing argument about the effect that time has on love by emphasizing the reality of time’s limit and how the deterioration of beauty throughout time can affect one’s emotions. Marvell’s argument of time’s effect on love is more persuasive than Shakespeare’s because he uses human-known truths, such as the limited time of physical existence and the deterioration of beauty throughout time, to support his claims. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” explains true love to be unconditional and unchanging, throughout life and continuing through the eternal, spiritual life after death. The speaker remarks that there are no impediments to true love and that “[l]ove is not love / [w]hich alters when it alteration finds” (lines 2-3). Shakespeare believes that true love never changes; nothing can come in its way to hinder it. He says that even though beauty succumbs to the effects of time, feelings of love will not fall victim to “his bending sickle” (9-10), greatly differing from Marvell’s views on love and the effects of time. Marvell begins by saying that his mistress’ coyness would not be a problem if they had all the time in the world (1-2), but he then goes on to remind her that time is of the essence. The speaker tells his mistress that he always hears “[t]ime’s winged chariot hurrying near” (22) so she must take advantage of his attempt at wooing her because her beauty will be irrelevant in her grave (25). M