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

or to our mental sexual character. Object choice was simply the visible indication of homosexuality or heterosexuality. So, I, a woman who ostensibly lives with a man, might in fact be living out a homosexual relationship with him, loving the mother or sister in him–and so on through countless permutations. Yet the fact that I may love the soft pleasing feminine creature who inhabits my otherwise ordinarily virile man and despise other more masculine bits of him, does not make me gay by any contemporary definition of identity.
    Nor is gender itself, as we know from the transgender politics of our time, an altogether stable category. We make mistakes about the gender of others, emphatically so in early childhood. The little girl who came home from playing with another pretty curly-haired creature and announced to her mother that Andrea is a nice girl, but you know she has a willy, is not unusual. Others feel out of place in the gender to which they have been assigned and go to great lengths to change it–through hormones and surgery. But desire and gender identity through the length of a life may not always coincide. In one case, recounted to me by a friend, a father of two decided at the age of around thirty that he was in fact homosexual. He abandoned his family to pursue his now spoken desires. After a while, dissatisfied, he came to the conclusion that he was inhabiting the wrong gender and was in fact a woman. He went through surgery and became one. Soon enough, he determined that he was not a heterosexual woman, but a gay woman, and started living with another. When one night his-now-her partner thought it would be nice to experience penetration, he/she broke down…
    In what follows, I have on the whole steered clear of such matter, and of identity politics as a whole, and instead steered into the dynamics of love as they take us through life and time. Though I may talk of ‘he and she’ in couples, it could often enough as easily be ‘she and she’, while my use of the word ‘marriage’ for contemporary unions intended to last includes cohabitation as well as the kinds sanctioned by Church and law.
    Nor have I focused on the more sensationalist reaches where Eros can lead–material I have culled in Mad, Bad and Sad and elsewhere. Extremes of sadomasochism, murderous abuse, bleak distortions of maiming love, dramatic perversions of power and fantasy: though all these are part of an extended picture of love and its stalking partner, hate, it seemed to me more important, in times when excess is so rampant in the media, to attempt a rebalancing and concentrate on what I call ordinary love, in itself already quite extraordinary enough.
    My sources are various: literature of all kinds, from fiction to ‘fact’, to memoir or philosophy, and interview. We are all, in one way or another, experts on love while remaining puzzled by its vagaries. If I turn in some sections mostly to fiction, it is in part because truth and lies in this area of the passions and intimacy are so often mixed up in each other. Talking or writing about their own lives within a factual mode, people are hardly guaranteed to tell the whole truth or even part of it–even in so-called objective questionnaires. People lie about love and sex, or ‘fictionalize’, tell their story in one way or another, depending on when they tell it or when they are asked and by whom. So fiction, which observes life, including one’s own, may be as reliable here as other kinds of truths.
    It’s interesting, parenthetically, to note that academic discourse has in this last decade moved some steps away from theorizing sexuality and gender and into love. This may be another indication that our culture feels a need to rebalance what has gone awry. The ‘desiring machines’ and performances of gender that characterized an intellectual moment of pleasure and plenty are being edged aside. This may, in part, have to do with the renewed prominence of religion in the