LOVE BLOAT

No, I’m not bitter. Honest. You can read the same themes in the last chapter of my book, Love Undetectable, which was not written after a break-up. Anyway, I still have my beagle (although she’s not here with me in London. Sniff.) A reader sends in the following passages from a book by Philip Slater, called The Pursuit of Loneliness. I think they’re right on the mark: “I like to think of romantic love as a rather glamorous disease like tuberculosis, that often turns ugly in its terminal stages. Its pathology is betrayed by its rigidity: a single act can be lethal to it. This is because it’s based on dreams, and dreams are fragile. With people who simply love each other as people, one event is rarely destructive or final or unforgivable. But in romantic love, one can do it, since there’s no flexibility when people are trying to force reality into a fantasy … Since romantic love thrives on absence, one is forced to conclude that it’s fundamentally unrelated to the character of the loved one, but derives its meaning from some prior relationship. ‘Love at first sight’ can only be transferred love, since there’s nothing else to base it on.” Amen, brother. Then there’s this fascinating insight: “Romantic love is rare in primitive communities simply because the bond between child and parent is more casual. The child tends to have many caretakers, and to be sensitive to the fact that there are many alternative suppliers of love. The middle-class American child, brought up in a small detached household, usually doesn’t have this sense of many options. His emotional life is heavily bound up in a single person, and spreading this involvement over other people as he grows up is more difficult. Americans must make a life task out of what happens effortlessly in many societies.” Makes complete sense to me. Happy Valentine’s Day on Wednesday.