All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Read Online Free

and that necessary tedium in between. Or I think of my mother’s distorted face staring at my father’s dead body, a man she was prone to criticize, but whose life she had shared through thick and thin for over forty years. I think of the numerous couples I know, estranged by the turmoil of life, coming back together in times of extreme need or illness, to share pain and difficulties, the old enmities laid aside. All that, too, is love.
     
     
    Why write about love? It’s just a four-letter word, after all, one often casually used. It can feel empty and platitudinous or bring with it a queasy embarrassment or a contemptuous sneer of dismissal. Its yuck factor is high. Over the last decades, love has been scoffed at as sentimental goo, derided as a myth to keep the masses enslaved, exposed as a mental malady and inveighed against as a power-monger in romantic garb bent on oppressing women in particular.
    Yet love bears within it a world of promise, a blissful state removed from the disciplines of work, the struggle for survival and even the rule of law and custom. The promise coexists with the knowledge that love can bring with it agonizing pain, turmoil, hate and madness–and in its married state, confinement, boredom, repetition.
    Indeed, love carries a freight of experience that takes us from cradle to grave. It frolics amongst the daffodils, dances to the secret tunes of perversity and transgression, drives some mad and others insanely happy. Its object can be long dead and exist only as a picture in a frame enlarged by imagination, or an all but naked man hanging on a wall, or a pop idol. It can be the subject of laughter or insufferable longing and often both at the same time. It can exist as an unbreachable attachment between couples of whatever sex, who seem on the surface to despise each other or engage in tortuous power games. It can play itself out intensely between fathers and daughters or mothers and sons–sometimes with deadly outcomes, at others happily enough. It often comes accompanied with the intense pain of jealousy or rejection.
    The Ancients split love apart into Eros and Agape, desire and affection, or benevolence. They tellingly gave Eros or Cupid, a sometime god, a physical embodiment: that playful, rambunctious, charming winged toddler who grows into a fetching nubile youth. In some versions Eros is passionate about other youths, but in his longest narrative he falls in love with the imaginative Psyche, or soul, she who can love in the dark, sparked by stories whispered into her ear. Son of the beautiful Aphrodite (Venus) and warring Mars, Cupid creates both havoc and pleasure. His arrows land in unexpected places, urban alleyways and romantic vales, and show little respect for gender or the status of their object.
    Following Aristotle’s lead, the great essayist Montaigne as well as the creator of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, designated four kinds of love: the natural, that is, affection, that ordinary bond of everyday life between familiars; the social, or those bonds, like friendship, formed through mutual projects and commonality; the hospitable, which in Christian terms becomes charity, the brotherly love offered to neighbours and outsiders; and finally and perhaps most problematically, the erotic, that sexually fuelled, driving or transforming power, both creative and destructive, that passion is. The last, some have thought, may also play a part in the others, acting as an energetic force that is then diffused or sublimated into other bonds.
    In the following pages, I have compacted this voluminous subject into something of an arc of love through individual time–a life history of love, one might say. I begin with a phenomenology of our first forays into love and attempt to anatomize passion’s constituent parts. I move on to marriage and more durable coupledom, its triangulation in adultery, love in the family and finally love and friendship. Throughout the book, smatterings of condensed