Preface

      When I set out to write a book about love in 2017, I was not happy. I was pretty sad. But I was still in love, or at least so I thought. All the messages from the culture around me were telling me what they had always told me: that being in love was about being happy. Being happy ever after. Happy with someone. Happy together.

      I had some questions. What if I’m not happy? What if I’m sad – or worse, depressed? Does that mean I’m no longer in love? Am I now unloving? Unlovable?

      I desperately hoped the answer to the last two was “no.” And I strongly suspected that was the answer. Even though I wasn’t happy, and didn’t know when, how, or even whether I would become happy in the future, I didn’t seriously doubt that I was in love with my partners. So instead, like any good logician, I questioned the other assumption: the one about how being in love means being happy.

      Being a philosopher by tendency, as well as by academic training, I wanted to think this assumption through, so that I could talk back to it (in my own head, first of all) with some confidence and conviction. Why had I been associating romantic love with happiness? What is the point of that association? Where does it come from? What are its effects?

Of course we all know that “happy ever after” comes from fairy tales, and we know fairy tales for what they are: fictions and fantasies.¹ Real love isn’t always happy. I knew that. But a fantasy is powerful, even when we know what it is. Our fantasies – our ideals – have a crucial part to play in shaping our lives. An ideal is something to strive for, something we can measure ourselves against and find ourselves wanting. Maybe I was still in love, but I was inclined to feel as if my sadness was a kind of failure condition for my relationships. Good love – ideal love – should be happy ever after, shouldn’t it? To say that the romantic “happy ever after” is unrealistic does nothing to diminish its status as an ideal, and hence its power to convince us we are falling short.

      The way I think things through is by writing, so in 2017 I started writing this book. But, as I wrote, the world turned, and it is now a very different place compared to how it was when I started. This book goes to press in 2022, in the echo of authoritarian challenges to democracy in the world’s most powerful nation, after years of watching the COVID pandemic hammer away at everything from the global economy to our intimate relationships. It took me a lot longer to write this book than I had originally planned. And it exploded into something bigger than what it was originally supposed to be.

      Sad Love turned out to be more than a theory of romance. It’s become a recipe for living in the world as it is now. To be sad, even heartbroken, does not mean one cannot love – one’s partner, one’s country, or even humanity. But to appreciate what love is under circumstances such as these, I needed a very different understanding of love from the one I had been taught. One that diverges radically from the stories and the stereotypes. Love that comes with no promise, and perhaps even no hope, of a “happy ever after,” but is not lessened or degraded by that. Love whose aim, and whose nature, is something other than happiness.

      That changes everything.

But, before I get to that, let me take a step back. What did I have to be so sad about in 2017? That was when my first book² on the philosophy of love came out. I did a lot of interviews. I mean a lot of interviews.³ People like to talk about love, I guess. Certainly there aren’t enough opportunities to talk about love – at least, not in public. I don’t mean opportunities to exchange clichés – there are plenty of those. I mean really talk about love. In my book, I was trying to open some space for all the “weird” questions that everyone has, the ones that we aren’t supposed to ask in polite company. So maybe that’s part of why I was suddenly in demand.

      It’s not the whole story, though. What the interviewers really wanted to talk about was not my theories so much as my personal life. In the book, I mentioned having a husband and a boyfriend at the same time (with everyone’s knowledge and consent). I described some of the challenges of this – the stigma, the awkwardness, the social pressure – canvassing research as well as my own experiences. I talked a little bit about what life can be like as an openly non-monogamous woman with two partners. (The short version: relentless slut-shaming.)

      Still, there are lots of books about the experience of being non-monogamous. What made mine worth an interview? Here’s one guess: it had something to do with who I am. There’s the fact that I’m a woman, of course, which might make me a more