Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled Read Free

one is Shelley, a Nuñez de Arce or La Rochefoucauld, one has no business publicly shooting off one's mouth about something as mysterious and ethereal as love. Unless one is le Marquis de Sade, in which case one has a personal vision of love that defies all strictures.
    But in fiction, even a groping dullard like myself can stumble upon a truth or two; or at least a rule-of-thumb that seems to work in certain situations, among certain kinds of people. So when I pass along these remarks, I'll try and couch them in anecdotal terms, all the better to entertain you, my dears, and not coincidentally to alleviate my own nervousness in this area.
    So here is just about all I know concerning love. Some of it light and happy, some of it cynical, perhaps some of it even accurate and truthful. One never knows, do one.
    The minute people fall in love, they become liars.
    You'd think such good feelings in the gut and other places would make people want to ensure the continuance of those feelings. But their fears overcome their good sense, not to mention their ethics. They begin to lie, virtually from the first moment they feel the stirrings in the aorta ... or wherever it is love is supposed to make itself felt.
    They lie in a hundred different ways. From the first tentative social conversations that bore them silly, they lie by pretending to be interested in inanities. This is a generality, but I think it holds: if it's guys, they listen to banal bullshit just on the off-chance they'll get laid. If it's women, they listen to the blown-out-of-proportion nonsense of men so they can reinforce the guy's need to be a Big Man. They lie to one another with looks and with words, and only the body-language tells the truth.
    They lie to keep the upper hand, even before they're threatened. The fear of rejection is so ingrained, from the schoolyard, from the locker room, from the parties, from the Homecoming Dance, from the years of seeing lithe tanned women in bikinis and feral muscular men with shirts open to the sternum up there on four-color billboards; they fear the unknown outer darkness of someone saying, "No."
    So they lie to one another. Granted, it's akin to the social lying we all do at parties, in restaurants, at social events: putting up with trivia to be politic or civilized or "gracious," whatever that means. Nonetheless, it is lying. And by feigning interest in that which bores or turns one off, they set up artificial grounds for a potential relationship that they have to maintain all through the rest of the association. I know a young woman who met a guy at a party. He turned her on, and he started voicing some of his rustic views on busing. She had worked for the integration legislation as a regional attaché to one of the senators pushing the facilitation of busing. She came out of ten years of hard and thankless work trying to achieve racial balance. He was a divorced businessman with two kids, who was, at heart, a man who feared and hated blacks. Though he would have gone to his grave swearing there wasn't a scintilla of bigotry in his well-clothed body. But they turned each other on, and she listened and nodded, and said nothing. They started dating. It lasted six months. Then it fell apart. When his narrow view of the world became too much for her, she started to fight back. Now he tells everyone she was a "castrating bitch" and she harbors guilt feelings for her own intransigency. False and untenable rules for the relationship had been the order of their mating from the git-go. It was doomed to fail.
    Earlier, I passed along a generality. There are, of course, exceptions. There are women who listen to the crapola put out by guys at parties because they want to get laid, and there are guys who put up with women's inanities because they want to be polite. It happens. But the point still holds. They do it because they want to be liked. They lie and listen to lies so they'll be accepted. The first faint stirrings of love--barely