Love Life

I’ve always said that although writing about love is interesting and perennial, writing about dating is usually exceptionally boring. A certain recent New Yorker piece made me wonder if that’s even true. I think a lot of writing about love has backslid into the same morass as writing about dating, the gender wars, tropes, clichés, a kind of performance of vulnerability that actually feels like an effort to prove that you’re desirable. It makes me think of the famous Flaubert quote that’s like: “Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage.” Emma (Madame Bovary) found that adultery had all the same banalities as marriage. Bourgeois love is a prison or whatever.

In Black Swans by Eve Babitz, there’s a story I think about all the time called “Slumming at the Rodeo Gardens,” which I read at Rockaway Beach one summer when I got a terrible sunburn on my back. In it, a mismatched actor and writer fall briefly in love in a doomed romance. The actor, Warren, is the kind of …