Love Amateur
On this day in the week where all boundaries are about to be broken, I wish I knew more about love. Other people, ewwwwwwgghhhh.
My dreams over the last few weeks have involved memories of desire - for a time when the only thing stopping me touching another body were my insecurities, rather than my survival. Last night I had flashbacks of a long gone era of gross over-confidence that I no longer recognise in myself when I organised a discussion on Valentine’s eve about love at the shrine of the Freud Museum. In the presence of the high caste of psychoanalysis in the last home of Freud, long before I really understood the terror of the deep. Although sex is indeed massive in psychoanalysis, as I remember it we didn’t talk much about it instead tippy toeing our way through relationality, under the shadow of the Greek crisis and the failure of solidarity.
It was a time when our need to understand the terror of intimate love just wasn’t so obvious as it is today.
Freud’s labours are not for the sexually faint-hearted, exploring the profound programming of sexual desire and a dynamic view of love as a way of relating shaped by early and unconscious experience, and well beyond our control. Since then me and my pandemic-child have been tucked away in a rural bunker trying to avoid eye contact with the ordinary trauma around and within us. In between the positive reinforcements and potty training we inevitably found ourselves staring into the abyss - ping ponging between the flight/fight of the central amygdala and my exhausted pre-frontal lobe struggling to hold us back from putting two fingers up at love. For this last terrible year we all loved under imperfect conditions.
If you woke up this morning feeling like a wronger on the love stakes, don't give up. Just put the existential crisis down and know that we are all amateurs when it comes to love. Love: A Guide for Amateurs is our psychic Valentine's to you. David Morgan talks about our fears of intimacy, Matt Gieve & Milena Stateva talk about whether a more humane economy is possible, Marianna Fotaki on why societies can't survive without love, Yiannis Gabrielle on a Europe without love, Candida Yates on love, jealousy and flirtation and Elizabeth Cotton on solidarity and loving heroes.
To read our other survival guides on sex, psychopaths, art and death go here.