Love in times of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera, as the title indicates, interweaves experiences of love with those of disease and sickness.  Why does the novel suggest that love = cholera? What does it imply about the nature of passion?  Establish through examples what you understand this metaphor to mean in the novel, and then analyze the relationships between the three principal characters in the light of your definition.  It will be crucial to your essay that you account for the ending of the novel.  How does Garcia Marquez resolve the paradoxes that follow from understanding love as a disease?  What are we as readers meant to learn from Fermina Daza’s and Florentino Ariza’s decision to remain on that ship forever?