A reading list on love
Though St Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday celebrating a Catholic Saint I don’t believe in, I still like to celebrate it. There is no other day dedicated to the awesome power of love as a force of good (& sometimes evil) in our lives.
I’ve gathered a bunch of articles connected by the theme of love. I hope you enjoy!
I can’t write a list about love without first mentioning bell hooks. Her ground-breaking work on love changed how we understand it. I ordered ‘All About Love’ and can’t wait to dive in. In the mean, enjoy this remembrance.
“True love has a transformative power — and that by learning how to face our fears we learn how to truly embrace love. Real love — that love of humans, the ability to look past foibles, and consider and comprehend the humanity in another is a gift more profound than anything in this world.”
On the misery of having a crush:
“The limerent crush is a temporary organising principle, an epistemic soap bubble, where a person coalesces a whole suite of judgments and impressions, values and aesthetics, a system as totalizing, and as doomed, as a dream.”
Melissa Febos got married during the pandemic and wrote a beautiful essay about proposing to her wife.
“We both still like the idea of choosing each other, over and over, for a big long time.”
The work of love. Mary H.K. Choi writes about the strain her parent’s ill health put on her marriage.
“I would hazily brown out for whole swaths of afternoon, evening, weeks. It’s like what Hemingway said in The Sun Also Rises about bankruptcy. How it happens gradually, then suddenly. A pervasive, subtle deadening. An ambient loss of interest. The arrival of a kind of tumbling off the edge, somatic evaporation, full-body tinnitus. In these moments, I’d look to my husband with wonder, seized by a thunderbolt of alacrity, and think, Who the fuck even are you?”On love after loss. A woman writes a dating ad for her husband which was published 10 days before she died.
“He is an easy man to fall in love with. I did it in one day.”
A story about grappling with a lack of love:
“Needy. The worst things a woman can be. Some days I still tell myself to take what is offered, because if it isn’t enough, it is I who wants too much. I am ashamed to be writing about this instead of writing about the whooping cranes, or literal famines, or any of the truer needs of the world.”
For the women who are ‘difficult’ to love. Wasan Shire’s powerful poem.
A story about platonic love: When the author’s wife became terminally ill with cancer, his best friend moved in to help. (This story was also made into a movie.)
“I had married into this situation, but how had he gotten here? Love is not a big-enough word. He stood and faced the reality of death for my sake. He is my friend.”
What happens to the things left behind after a love affair. Leslie Jamison visits the breakup museum:
“The Museum of Broken Relationships is a collection of ordinary objects hung on walls, tucked under glass, backlit on pedestals….One of the most popular items in the gift shop is the “Bad Memories Eraser”—an actual eraser sold in several shades—but in truth the museum is something closer to the psychic opposite of an eraser. Every one of its objects insists that something was, rather than trying to make it disappear. Donating an object to the museum permits surrender and permanence at once. You get it out of your home, and you make it immortal”
For the TL;DR brigade, here are 20 one-line love stories.
The NYT has published a series of tiny modern love stories (less than 100 words each).
And here’s a list for the people who love longreads.
If you need a hit of joy, watch this.
Finally, some punctuation nerd humour because that is my love language.
