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On Being Romantic or Classical
We are – each one of us – probably more one than the other. The categories explain a lot about us; how we approach nature, what makes us laugh, our attitudes to love, what our politics are… We may not...
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Romantic Realism
I: INTRODUCTION We expect love to be the source of our greatest joys. But it is – of course – in practice, one of the most reliable routes to misery. Few forms of suffering are ever as intense as those...
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Loving and Being Loved
Curiously we speak of love as one thing rather than discerning the two very different varieties that lie beneath a single word: being loved and loving. It appears that we can only make a relationship...
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Our Most Romantic Moments
It’s an odd feature of love that some of our most romantic moments include these scenarios: – being with a lover who lives a whole continent away from us and can never move to be closer. – an...
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How Romanticism Ruined Love
To fall in love with someone feels like such a personal and spontaneous process, it can sound strange — and even rather insulting — to suggest that something else (we might call it society or culture)...
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Why We Need to Speak of Love in Public
It can sound strange to hear the way religious leaders and politicians, at certain moments, speak so much about love: about the love of the stranger, the love of the weak, the love of the failed....
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The Cure for Love
For intense periods of our lives, we suffer the agony of unrequited love. Our sorrow is accompanied by a certainty that if only the elusive being would return our smiles, come for dinner or marry us,...
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Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
Love is our highest value, what we all crave and what we believe makes us fundamentally human, but it is also the source of considerable anxiety. Chiefly, we worry whether we are entirely normal...
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The Definition of Love
The world is sick for a surprisingly modest-sounding reason: we don’t understand love – and yet we are rather convinced that we do. We talk a lot of love of course, but generally in terms of a dizzying...
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A Short History of Love
The strange thing about love is that even though we experience it in a deeply personal and apparently instinctive way, it has a history. In other words, people around the world haven’t always fallen in...
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On Romanticism
Romanticism is one of the most important historical events of all time. Unlike a lot of what gets called ‘history’, Romanticism isn’t a war or a piece of technology or a political event. It refers to...
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What is Love?
– Care One way to get a sense of why love should matter so much, why it might be considered close to the meaning of life, is to look at the challenges of loneliness. Too often, we leave the topic of...
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How to Love
One of the great intellectual puzzles that daily life forces all of us to consider on a slightly too regular basis is: ‘Why are other people so awful? How come they are so unreliable, aggressive,...
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Pygmalion and your Love life
In Book 10 of the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we’re introduced to one of the world’s more curious but telling myths: a Cypriot sculptor called Pygmalion has developed a problem with women. He has...
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Why Do I Feel So Lonely?
When we think of what might have been lost on the way to becoming modern, we’re liable to think about mealtimes: how seldom they now take place communally, how rare it is for whole families to gather,...
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