Why I Wrote A Silly Love Book

Cupid

So why would anyone choose to add to the literature-mountain? Perhaps for the same reason that the mountain got made in the first place. Romantic love makes you crazy, and speaking, singing or writing about it is often the best cure. From Catullus to Shakespeare to Beethoven to Eric Clapton, human beings have regularly been pushed to produce by their own painful romantic feelings. It doesn’t matter that the objects of their affection so often turn out to be hopeless non-starters. The point is that the feelings, at the time, are so unbearable that they have to be dealt with somehow — and expressing them can at least give you the sense that they’ve got a place to go.

If symphonies, plays or hit records aren’t your speciality you might just as well find yourself talking on the phone incessantly or sending countless loopy emails. In a sense it’s all the same thing. Love clearly needs to be articulated. So if someone writes a book about love it may not be their fault. It may be that they’ve decided it’s better than bothering their friends with endless angsty texts. It may be because they can only afford to go to psychoanalysis once a week. Or it may be because they can’t compress all their mental machinations into a short poem. In any case it would be kind to forgive them because they are simply doing what humans seem to need to do.

I didn’t calmly decide to write a book about love, I was thrown into it by circumstance. But to the list of excuses above you could also add that I listen to a lot of people’s accounts of their romantic difficulties in my own work as a psychoanalyst. Another excuse is that I often waste money on magazines because, on the covers, they promise to answer all sorts of difficult questions: Does he really love you? Do you really love him? What should you wear to make him love you more? Magazine people are often very good at spotting the kinds of questions we’d like to have answered — but notoriously bad at keeping their promises. This is partly because some of the best questions are unanswerable. And partly because magazine publishers can be a bit unscrupulous.

Dolly Parton

While I didn’t imagine I could write a book that would actually solve the mysteries of love, I did think it might be as well to try to say something about the very pressing wish to understand it better. (If only for the sake of my own sanity.) And also to attempt to say something proper about why it’s so bloody difficult. I certainly didn’t imagine that I had anything more useful to offer than Plato, Freud or Dolly Parton.

So I took some of their ideas, and all sorts of other people’s, and tried to pick out some of the top tips from across the centuries. There were lots of good ones. By the end of writing the book I was definitely less mad (despite having fallen in love in the middle of chapter six, with someone who is neither hopeless nor a non-starter). My hope is that reading it might have the same effect on other people. Or better, that it will leave them so confused and frustrated that they will go and write a much more insightful book — which I will then be able to turn to if love ever makes me crazy again.