Chapter 17

“There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine.” —Patrick Bateman, American Psycho

“Love is a catastrophe. It’s a crazy illness. Love ruins your life. But I am very sad when I am not in love.” —Slavoj Žižek, Interview with Slavoj Žižek, January 7th, 2010, Hyderabad, India

“Love is not supposed to be cute. Love is supposed to be raw and destructive.” —Frank Gallagher, Shameless

“That was torture. Thank you.” —Wednesday Addams, Wednesday 

My girlfriend finally left me. Good for her. She was 20 years old, in college, and having fun. Meanwhile, I was… well, not 20, not in college, and not having fun. These were supposed to be the best years of her life—how could I take that from her? Of course, it’s easy to be noble about it now, but back then? I basically detonated.

Alain Badiou, the philosopher behind In Praise of Love, describes love as an “event.” Žižek goes further, calling it a “violent event.” Makes sense. It’s interesting how so many languages recognize this—there’s a “fall” into love—like a hole, or a trap. Leonard Cohen took it even further, calling love a “step into an avalanche.” And yeah, that tracks. Love knocks you sideways. It ruins your peace of mind. It changes everything—how you see the world, how you see yourself. You swore you’d never be that guy—you’d never rearrange your life around someone. You were fine, functional, mentally stable… and then, suddenly, you weren’t. You fell in love.

It’s madness.

After the breakup, I kept texting her. Over and over. Just ripping and reopening the scab. She tortured me for months. It was like one of those action movies where the villain beats the hell out of a guy tied to a chair for hours—then, out of nowhere, stops, lights the guy a cigarette, and has a heart-to-heart. Gives him a tiny sliver of hope… then boom—the torture resumes. That was our post-breakup dynamic. A cinematic masterpiece of male suffering.

But hey, it was my first sober relationship. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. Because that madness? That madness is precisely the type of lifeblood that makes us feel alive.

PASSIONATE LOVE

These days, people are afraid of passionate love. They want it, but they want the passion without the pain. Guys have devoted entire websites to teaching other men how to have game and pretend to be alpha. Girls post memes about being “players” and never catching feelings, like the absolute worst thing you could do is let someone get the best of you. And God forbid you appear “obsessed” with someone. Like there’s no coming back from that.

Even dating has been sanitized and optimized to avoid emotional risk. Badiou had some thoughts on computer matchmaking, and while I don’t have a problem with dating apps, there’s something clinical about reducing human connection to an algorithmic swipe. Where’s the magic in that? The chance encounters, the unexpected sparks. The spontaneous, chaotic, dangerous nature of love. A beauty for the few.

YOUNG LOVE

Rainer Maria Rilke once said that love is “the most difficult task for humans.” In Letters to a Young Poet, he argued that young people are too underdeveloped to truly love anyone. They excel at losing themselves in the other person but suck at finding themselves again. Hegel—who also saw love as a waking nightmare—believed that love dissolves you into another person’s subjectivity. But he also believed in the potential to rediscover yourself through them. Rilke, on the other hand, was a little more cynical. He thought young people just got stuck in the lost phase and never made it to the found part.

Biologically, I wasn’t exactly young. Emotionally? My 20-year-old girlfriend had me beat. When I was 20, I spent my time high, chasing unattainable women, and pushing away the ones who actually cared about me. I thought having the hottest girlfriend possible would change how people saw me, make me matter more.

Žižek argues that society is obsessed with removing the dangerous parts of everything. We want Coke without sugar, coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol… and now, “love without the fall.” In one lecture, Žižek said Badiou once spotted an ad in a French newspaper from a matchmaking service literally advertising love without the fall.

And that’s the real question Badiou and Žižek are getting at:

How can you ever be found without getting lost in the first place?

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