Depreciate love: love as an illusion and a trap, and to make mock of love

To Make a Mock of Love
Love is an illusion and a trap

There are people who love to devalue love. To them, love is an instable emotion. Or a youthful feeling, or a prison, or a displaced sentimentalism with an effeminate side. Or mere illusions spread out by inner human instincts, a kind of trap mounted by nature to guide us to its purposes.

To some people we must not listen to love ditties. We should make a mock of love. We must be strong, and face the world as it is, and always be ready to face its cruelty, without lyricism and dislocated poetry. The important things are power, sex, pleasure, winning and surviving. Romeos and Juliets, Tristans and Isolds, Heloises and Abelards are just characters of literary or medieval loves. Life is not like that.

In fact, life and love, in their core, shouldn’t be confused with the big lyrical loves. But that doesn’t mean that we may reduce our life to a world ruled by insensibility, by the law of the strongest, by the absence of beauty, friendship, or love. Without the central elements of love, we no longer live in a human world.

We can’t abridge the world to its more cruel forms: to the love of power, or to the love of strength or carnal pleasure. We can’t debase life to its mechanical aspects. We can’t live without emotions, feelings. We can’t live happily without love. As Francis Bacon said, where there is no love we only perceive solitude, and «faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal». And that’s why love is, in many senses, the most important thing in our lives.

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Voracious appetite: Henry Fielding
What is commonly called love, namely the desire of satisfying a voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate whit human flesh.

Fantasies: Nicolas Chamfort
Love, in the form in which it exist in society, is
nothing but the exchange of two fantasies and the superficial contact of two skins
Nicolas Chamfort, 1741-1794, French writer, Maxims et Pensées.

Delusion: H. L. Mencken and Lord Byron
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

In her first passion woman loves her lover, in all the other all she loves is love.
Lord Byron, 1788-1824, English poet, Don Juan

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, he would have written sonnets all his life?
Lord Byron, 1788-1824, English poet, Don Juan

Insanity: Ambrose Bierce
Love: a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder... It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914, American writer, The Devil's Dictionary

Unknown: Somerset Maugham
Love is what happens to men and women who don't know each other
Attributed to W. Somerset Maugham, 1874-1965, English writer