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Only trouble is interesting, and what causes more trouble for us humans than our love lives? With love, we’re leaping into the unknown, and it’s thrilling, surprising, scary, overwhelming (and sometimes underwhelming and disappointing) all at once. Love is often unrequited, dangerous, or forbidden, and even when it’s straightforward, there’s still a story in it because we are mortal beings, hurtling toward an impending end, so at some point, we (or our beloved) will be left heartbroken; love’s trouble always makes for a good story. There’s a very successful publishing industry—the romance novel—dedicated to it.
The trouble with writing about love, and its bedfellow, sex, is it’s so elusive and mysterious that we often try to wrestle it into submission by assigning tired, old descriptions to it, or else we try to obfuscate what’s really happening and we slap a euphemism onto it. This is why there are so many clichés for love: Love is blind. Love at first sight. Love conquers all. Love makes the world go round. The problem is that these overused phrases say exactly nothing of this complex, mysterious emotion, which is why we must come up with new and strange ways of talking about love and lust. We may never be able to completely capture the complexities, but we must try.
