The Vice Grip of Philosophy

What really stood out about Alcibiades's speech, to me anyway, was that he described philosophy as a snake that bites your heart and you are infected with its venom.
This is a very different view from Nietzsche's, which compared philosophy to a foothold from which philosophers could skip on to the next step wearing leis and singing with woodland creatures.
However, I think this other description of philosophy is also very accurate. Philosophy isn't always rainbows and sunshine and wonder about the world. It is often despair and anxiety over the things that we can't explain.
The venom of philosophy isn't something we can easily get rid of, either. How do you train a mind not to wonder once it's learned how? Seeing all of the philosophical questions in the world is like noticing that your favorite shoes have a scratch on them. You don't know how it got there, but suddenly you can't unsee it. You wonder about what life would be like if you were just ignorant to the different issues that plague you, but there's no going back. In a sense, that is what is so beneficial about philosophy. It forces you to deal with things, rather than shove them under the rug like, "LOL, brb."

I guess it's more of a tough love on philosophy's part.

Diotima

Of all the speeches of Love, I think Diotima's is the most accurate.
While the others were overly hopeful or realistic, Diotima's really captured the transcendent nature of Love. Her description of Love as a spirit that is between mortal and god and acts as a messenger between the two is the perfect explanation for why we assign such grand characteristics to Love. We believe that Love can transcend lifetimes. We believe that Love persists in the afterlife. Whatever we believe about life itself, Love always makes an appearance; it seems to be able to adapt to any belief system and persist in a nearly intact form.
Diotima's spiritual explanation accounts for this adaptability of Love.

Another reason I really liked Diotima's speech is that is is even more realistic than the false hope of Phaedrus or the realistic view of Pausanias. She says that not only is Love not perfectly beautiful, it is also not perfectly ugly. She gives Love the same forgiveness she would a person, which is what makes Love so accessible. Just because Love isn't entirely good does not make it bad, otherwise we'd all be bad people.