Don't be fooled by cynics: love exists and it is everything

A recent article in the Times saw a journalist casting a jaundiced eye on her marriage, but her attempt to tell us all we should expect the death of love is corrosive

I have The Times delivered on a Saturday, partly because having the newspaper placed through your letterbox means there is no need to go out first thing, partly because I was born into a generation which remains by instinct print-first, and partly because it feels like an inordinate luxury for minimal expenditure. My devil-my-care exterior may fool you into ignoring the fact that I am often wedded to routine, and, without positive intention, I long ago fell into a pattern for reading the paper. And the Weekend section often doesn’t make the cut.

This is not a criticism of those who write for or edit the Weekend section. It just happens to cover subjects which aren’t at the top of my list of interests: I don’t have a garden, I don’t drink alcohol any more, and, although I like to travel, I find travel writing can make me dejected and envious of those more globe-trotting than I. However, sometimes the front page of the section will catch my eye.

And last Saturday, 25 February, was just such a day. The main picture was of a couple sitting next to each other on a sofa, both rather serious, behind the headline “My husband used to be hot”. As I’m sure I was supposed to, it struck me as a rather harsh judgement on one’s partner. The sub-head, “If I met my partner now, would I fancy him?” hardly seemed to cushion the blow. The article in question was by Molly Gunn, the long-time editor of a website (“blogzine”) called Selfish Mother; spoiler alert, any red flags being raised by the name are, I think, justified. Gunn was a fashion journalist originally, and has written for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Evening Standard and a number of magazines. She lives in Bruton in Somerset with her husband Tom, and it is Tom Mangan to whom Gunn’s article was devoted.

Mangan is a long-time music producer and “electronic music evangelist”, who works under the nom de musique Tee Mango. I know, I know. It’s not all right, but he didn’t deserve what was coming. Gunn stresses that Mangan “has signed off on me writing about this”, which is an interesting choice of phrase: it does not say that he saw the article before publication—he may have done, but it is not explicit—and Gunn goes on to admit, with less embarrassment than one might have expected, that she has form. I can’t match the breezy lack of contrition of her own words, so here is what she says.

Three years ago, I wrote about our marriage and pondered the idea of us getting divorced to a global audience. He found out only when I posted the piece to my 116,000 Instagram followers (I run the online blog and brand Selfish Mother). Oops.

“Oops.” That is certainly one way of summing up the situation. One can imagine that Mangan was, to say the least, dismayed. It is not a wholehearted vote of confidence from your wife and the mother of your children.

This all sounds, I realise, a bit catty and hostile towards Gunn, which is not inaccurate but perhaps hasty. Let me set the scene. She has set out to talk honestly about the challenges of married life, especially for couples who have been married for a long time (22 years in Gunn’s and Mangan’s case) and have children, which is (I gather and have no reason to doubt) an exhausting and stressful factor. (Sure, yes, they bring you joy every day and have transformed the way you look at the world. Fine. Jolly good. I don’t have children but I accept they must cut into your leisure time.)

Honesty in journalism is a vital quality. Without it there is no journalism, no reporting, no insight: there is just storytelling. And the way in which relationships change is an interesting subject. I can’t claim to have spent 22 years with a partner, but even after a few years your circumstances and interaction with a significant other change. Hearing how other couples have gone through this sort of change and how they have managed it, for better or worse, is a good subject for an article and, for some people, may even be instructive. Anyone who imagines they have nothing to learn from other people’s relationships is arrogant at best and missing out. No two relationships are the same but many are variations on the same tune.

I certainly wouldn’t criticise Gunn for trying to explore the nostalgia we all feel for relationships of our youth, the different ways we act and feel in middle-age and the difficulties we all have in bridging the gap between those things. It must be equally challenging, perhaps in unexpected ways, if the relationship of your youth and the relationship you’re currently in are with the same person: tackling that factor of same-but-different must be very demanding. I make no judgements on those who are attempting this. Good luck to you and may your god go with you.

It may be honesty that Gunn displays. Certainly she is searingly open about those aspects of her marriage which dissatisfy her. After recalling the bliss of their early days, when he was a DJ in Ibiza and was “handsome… ‘so fit’, as my friends and I would say”, she states flatly that something has gone. “We’re lucky if we remember to hug each other in the mornings,” she mourns, “we don’t make each other laugh like we did.” The feeling of flatness, of a crackle of electricity having vanished, is eloquently implied. And having had the insight not just to see but analyse that is rather brave.

Her next bid brought me up short. “Sometimes we talk about divorce.” As it happens, I have been divorced (though for many reasons, including successively liberalising legislation governing divorce and the goodwill of my ex-wife, the formal bureaucratic part of the process was fairly easy), though it was a long time ago now. I may simply have a different, more buttoned-up, less emotionally honest way of approaching the business of being in a couple. But, for me, ‘talking about’ divorce would be a shattering blow. I cannot conceive of having that discussion but deciding against pursuing the course. But I don’t have children, which is a big difference, so each to his or her own.

Gunn and Mangan have certainly been to the very edge of ending their relationship. She relates that they lived apart for a few months at the end of 2020, their children dividing their time between the two parents. And the child-related implications seem to have been decisive in their reuniting: “for me it was too much back and forth,” Gunn writes. “”It was either full-on solo parenting or rattling around our lovely house on my own.” That word, “lovely”, is, by the way, the most positive thing she has said about her current life by that point in the article. Their “lovely” house.

We all have to be practical at times, sometimes about matters of the heart in ways which can seem cold, and it does not always mean we are as cold as we might look. Gunn is alive to this perception. She seems, however, to lean towards embracing it, suggesting that perhaps that is the sensible approach.

Unromantic? The cynic in me wonders whether a successful marriage is less about boom-boom love and more about logistics… Tom and I are a top team and run a slick operation when it comes to our small biz HQ, aka the family home. He makes good coffee, and gets the kids up like a military operation. I plan holidays and house renovations… we’re kick-ass parents.

Look, I’ll admit that by this stage I’m already feeling uneasy. I tried to overlook the gentle brag of having access to 116,000 Instagram users when she admitted to talking publicly about her marriage without tipping off her husband, though I frowned. And it is certainly true that in a long-term relationship, especially—I imagine and observe—one which involves children, each partner takes on a variety of roles and, if one wants to be McKinsey-esque about it, specialisations and niche capabilities. Logistics have rarely been one of mine. But I did shudder at the way she was so happy to praise her husband and herself for these things, which are ultimately administrative issues, and proceed to the conclusion that “we’re kick-ass parents”. They may be, but that shouldn’t be why.

The problem in the relationship, she volunteers, is that “we annoy each other”. (I find at least half of that very believable.) She lists niggles, and the ones to which she admits raised some small but definite red flags: she doesn’t listen to him, she switches off when he tries to communicate, she’s curt. It’s not without affection: “there is love, yes.” But she explains that their love is obscured, sometimes entirely, by these quotidian concerns of child-rearing and domestic management. They have to “scrape away the layer of crap to see it again”.

I find that enormously sad. I realise some will find that patronising, or scoff that it’s easy for me to say that as a child-free single man. Sure, maybe it is. But I do find it sad. I also find it annoying, I’ll be honest. Raising three children and maintaining a home which is neither collapsing nor looking like the set of Withnail may be a stretch for me, but that’s a ‘me’ thing, not a general burden. What Gunn and Mangan are doing is living life: the life of a middle-class couple without any obvious overwhelming challenges. That’s what millions of people do, day in, day out. It’s existence. But Gunn finds it a crushing burden which time and again obscures the apparent love which still exists between her and her husband.

Of course “life” can get in the way of a blissful and romance-filled existence. Sometimes you and your partner will have to tackle dull things, like asking which day is bin day, or who’s going to be in for the Waitrose delivery. And I’m not so starry-eyed as to think that we can have these conversations while staring deep into each other’s eyes or showering each other with delicate butterfly kisses or filing away mentally the observation that your partner’s smile is like the sun bursting through the clouds after a savage storm, filling you with a joy so powerful it makes your heart feel tight and huge in your chest, almost uncontainable by the fragile mortal coincidence of your ribcage. But I have also managed to conduct quotidian business like that without looking at my partner and, apparently, thinking how much they bore me and how much less we are in love than we were at first.

The meat of her article, however, is (it seems to me) less about warmth and affection and that elusive electric connection between two people in love, and more about physical attraction. That in itself is not a small thing. However high-minded and sapiosexual (you’ll have to imagine my eyebrow curving like the Wembley arch) you might be, physical attraction is very often a significant part of a relationship, not just at the beginning but as a thread running through it. If you find that the physical nature of what drew you to your partner has waned, that is, I think, uncomfortable and alarming. Maybe we should applaud Gunn’s bravery in taking it head-on, risking offence by being blunt but trying to pick apart the workings of what it is to fancy someone.

So is it any wonder I have wondered: if I met Tom now, would I still fancy him? Tom has asked himself the same question: he might not fancy me either.

Well, without ordering t-shirts emblazoned #TeamTom, at least he’s not taking this lying down. But the theoretical question of whether she would fancy her husband if she met him now, while it might be an amusing parlour game (albeit potentially one of those parlour games which spirals into acrimony, recrimination, tears, accusations and ultimately hatred), misses a huge point. Because whether she fancies her husband now is not the same question as whether she would fancy him if she met him and they were strangers. She has known him for decades, been intimately entwined with his life for 22 years, and that, to put it mildly, makes a difference.

Gunn reassures her audience that romance is still important to her and that she doesn’t view her marriage in strictly transactional terms. At least, she tries to. “For all my talk about logistics,” she insists, “I want to have sex with my husband.” Not a high bar, but good to hear. “To do that I have to fancy him—and vice versa.” She tells us that they do still have sex and sometimes she does fancy him. “On some days.” But she again deploys the brutal honesty of those with ironclad self-confidence.

On other days I look at this 45-year-old man, with this furrowed brow, a habit of talking with food in his mouth, an unfortunate green-gold gilet, and a cap (grimace) that hides his now coarse salt-and-pepper hair, and I think: who are you?

Ouch. I often say, with a nod to Elizabeth I, that I try not to make windows into men’s (or women’s) souls (though one ex stared at me and said “That’s literally all you do”). And there are, without even a scintilla of doubt, complex dynamics in the relationship between Gunn and Mangan, and she may well be following a well-worn route in making these criticisms that is one of their habits, a kind of formalised set of words of the true meaning of which outsiders can never be aware. But it seems pretty savage; and it seems doubly so because, although she’s ostensibly talking about the purely physical aspect of their marriage, there are some remarks in that combustible paragraph which carry dark inferences. The furrowed brow, for example: I think there is more here than a tacit plea for him to have Botox. And that casual but devastating “(grimace)”: I don’t like most modern headwear and it’s not clear what kind of cap she means, but I have a strong sense that she’s talking about more than his choice of hat.

Gunn acknowledges that some of this doubt is down to her. “Tom is a poster-boy New Man,” she asserts, though it has been a long time since I heard anyone talking about “New Men” in a way that was wholly positive and complimentary. (The BBC had written their obituary almost a decade ago.) Gunn goes further: “He’s handsome, he’s a good catch!” Outsiders, though, are blind in her one-eyed kingdom. They are not equipped to make a genuine judgement on Mangan’s attractiveness. “”Nobody has been on this 22-year journey with us, so they don’t know what has changed.”

Of course she is quite right that each partner changes over the course of a long-term relationship. The basic-bitch but relentless ageing process will see to that if nothing else does. And rare, vanishingly rare, is the couple which has the flushed-cheek, short-of-breath mutual obsession of their first few weeks and months after a journey of decades together. But Gunn is clear that the change has been for the worse, and she seems relatively ready to assign blame for that.

Sometimes it makes me sad that the Tom I met is gone. The handsome, chilled-out DJ with worn-in tees and long hair is no longer around… he no longer pats my bum on regular occasions. It used to be a thing. He no longer calls me ‘Molly Mott the Moo’. Now it’s just ‘Mo’.

There’s a lot in that and not all of it is for less than a strong stomach. But I find it hard to read it as saying anything except “My husband was hot when he was 23 and now he’s less hot and that decline in attractiveness is making me sad.” Gunn is entitled to feel that way, but Mangan is entitled to feel deflated by it: she remarks that “this week he has been calling himself ‘your formerly hot husband’”. To be honest, I’m not sure that’s a light-hearted joke. It sounds to me like resignation and, perhaps, a prickle of offence. And he’d have every right to feel that way.

It is also an interesting thought experiment to wonder how those sentiments would be received by the reading public, let alone the other partner, if made by a man of a woman. “She was hot when she was 22 but the leggy girl in the tight dresses is no longer around and she doesn’t fondle my genitals as much as she used to.” The author wouldn’t just be cancelled, he’d be on watch lists.

Look, some of you may think I’m way off here. You may think Gunn has made a brave and honest attempt to dissect the modern marriage. Fine. I can only draw on my own experiences and opinions, and those tell me this is a sour and self-aggrandising approach to a relationship. To dwell at such length and with such open sadness—in the world’s most famous newspaper!—on the ‘disappearance’, the ‘absence’ of the good-looking young version of your husband whom you really fancied, without, it seems, any desire or even ability to see the strengths of a relationship which has lasted for more than 20 years, simply feels hollowing, reductive, hopeless.

Gunn is not completely without self-reproach. “I’ve never been a picnic,” she admits (though that itself, ‘not being a picnic’, implies a bit of vibrancy and edge that the portrait of her ageing, boring husband lacks). But the faults to which she admits are, deliberately or subliminally, very carefully parsed. She confesses that she is “strong-willed, opinionated”, traits which are only problems for the worst kind of Andrew Tate-worshipping, inadequate misogynist. They are qualities which are only the furthest extent of genuine virtues: if a husband is irritated or upset by his wife having opinions and a personality, that’s a journey to a dark place none of us wants to visit. So admitting them as faults is a little disingenuous.

True, Gunn says she is “snappy and tense” (though this is at its worst when she is “trying to get kids out of the house”; damn those parental responsibilities for bringing out her faults). She also “zones out” when Mangan talks “for more than two minutes”, which must try his patience. But there are more humblebrag failings to be shown: she has “unwavering belief in myself and my abilities” (confidence taken too far) and “a low boredom threshold” (well, if the world fails to excite her…). And she suffers from ADHD, often diagnosed late in women.

(This is a fascinating subject; as Gunn says, women often manage to mask their symptoms or work around them through the responsibilities of middle life and only present to clinicians once those external factors are taken away. This short article is worth reading as a primer.)

Concluding, Gunn seems to try to paint a positive gloss on her harsh assessment. “I have discovered recently,” she says, “that the way to keep trucking is to learn to love, accept or simply ‘marvel with mild amusement’ at the changes you both go through, over and over again.” Mangan may or may not be relieved to hear that. Perhaps he has shrugged off remarks she made elsewhere in the article which would be branded on my heart and which would haunt my thoughts. If so, good for him. I have absolutely no stake in, or any right to force the direction of, the Gunn-Mangan marriage and they will do what they think is best, finding an accommodation with which they can both live—or they won’t.

Why am I writing this, then? I have come this far because there are a few broad opinions I want to flag, and some views I want to offer. Let me try to encapsulate these under three headings.

1. The way Gunn characterises the relationship between her and her husband relies almost entirely on his looks and personality, and the faults within those; it is just unpleasant.

2. Gunn treats physical attraction as an absolute and something which cannot evolve, only decline, which process will of course bring sadness and a sense of loss.

3. We should be brave enough to accept this inevitability, acknowledge that “love” is a generalisation or a concept which is positively misleading, and once we expect less, we will be happier.

I have been married once, engaged another time and in enough long-term relationships with a variety of conclusions that I think I am entitled at least to propose (ha) some theses. I cannot, and would have no wish to, advance my opinions as universal truths: as I say, each relationship is different, and can never fully be understood except by the participants (sometimes not even them). But just as Gunn generalises from the specific, I do think there are some alternative models.

Of course fancying someone is an integral part of a relationship. It is often the catalyst, as outward appearances are our quickest cues for making deeper assessments. You fancy someone, you spend some time with them, initially in quite a ritualised way such as at dinner or in pubs or cafés or participating in, or experiencing, shared events: you go to the theatre, or the cinema, or a museum or gallery.

(Do not do what I once did, which is to take a woman to the hallowed British Film Institute to see Thomas Vinterberg’s dazzling Festen (1998). I hadn’t seen the film for years, and had forgotten the balance between the different qualities expressed in the description “dark comedy-drama”. The humour is sharp but sometimes lip-puckering rather than laugh-out-loud, and I had somehow blanked any recollection of the climactic scene at a celebration dinner in which the son accuses his father, whose birthday it is, of having abused him and his twin sister (who has recently committed suicide) in their childhood. It’s heavy stuff. The woman in question professed to having enjoyed seeing the film again but we had no further contact and I cannot blame her.)

There are, it is undeniably true, different levels of physical attractiveness. Some notions of beauty are shared and widely agreed, and we will all seek out attractive mates. But there are two qualifications here. Although it is true much less often than some people claim, some are not driven primarily by looks when it comes to finding people attractive. While I don’t adhere to the notion of demisexuality or sapiosexuality as formal identities, I do firmly believe that feelings other than straightforward libido can affect the way you see potential partners: sometimes you come to find people whose personalities and characters attractive more physically pleasing that you did or might have done from a standing start, and I am sure I have balanced the different elements of sexuality when looking at partners. As relationships evolve, you constantly reassess your partner, and romantic love can change the balances and make you find them enduring attractive. This isn’t rocket science, I don’t think, nor is it a secret, nor is it in any way a cause of shame or discomfort.

We all know this, instinctively. Even the most transactional men in a club, sizing up the female punters, will sometimes differ on the attractiveness of their subjects. We tend to dress this up in pseudo-philosophical terms: he doesn’t do it for me, I don’t quite find her attractive, he’s not my type, she’s just not the sort of person I usually go for. We accept it on a cold, brutal way, when you are assessing men or women or both like they are potential sales at a cattle market: yet sometimes it seems that we forget or refuse to believe that we continue this process, tacking minutely in the wind, operating a kind of physical and sexual mixing deck as we go through a relationship. If I can speak only for men for a moment, you will hear variations on the phrase “she’s the most beautiful woman in the world” all the time, but logically all but one of these judgements will be untrue. Still, while they are not literally accurate, they express the fact that you, for reasons which may proceed from physical appearance but take in a million other factors, are making a complex judgement on your mate, and, although it may not be obvious to others, it is almost certainly authentically true in your mind.

The idea, then, that one can infer from Gunn, that our set physical assessment of a partner will decline inevitably, and one can simply scratch around for compensatory feelings, is to me a dreadful one. I have seen couples in their sixties who still regard each other with the fluttering heart of desire in absolute sincerity. They are not consciously fooling themselves: instead, there has been a development of the tools they use to judge their partners and, while the flowing of blood and the quickening of the pulse may now come from a broader base, they are not going through the motions. They still, very much, fancy each other.

I recoil, too, at the idea of mourning the departure of the person you first met as the years advance. Of the people I have been in relationships with or had profound feelings for (not a coterminous group, alas), I can in I think every case remember the moment of first meeting, and the way I felt in seeing them for the first time. And of course it’s utterly thrilling. We’ve all met people—I say that, but I am assuming my experiences are not unique—who have grabbed us instantly, the fingers of their beauty or manner tight around our heart in a second. It’s naturally a deeply affecting feeling: “love at first sight”, an idea we cherish because it leavens base animal attraction with an admixture of romantic feeling and the warmest, most generous kind of compassion of which our species is capable. It would be invidious of me to try to describe instances that I’ve had, because the other parties would be clearly identifiable, but I’ve certainly felt what James Fleet’s Tom in Four Weddings and a Funeral describes inarticulately but movingly as “Thunderbolt city”.

But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a relationship as a gradual and sad distancing from that first encounter. Of course you can never go back, of course that first electric encounter will grow further away chronologically, of course it will be a treasured memory; indeed you may well turn the recollection over and over in your hands so much that it becomes smooth and shiny, even more radiant than maybe it was at the time, but that’s a function of memory. That’s how we manage our recollections, cherishing and enhancing those transcendent moments, while we might dull and obscure the less joyful or positively painful parts of the past. But seeing your life, and the onward journey of your relationship, as a relentlessly increasing remoteness from a perfect start, is a recipe only for disappointment. You are creating a pattern in your mind which will inevitably be a souring and diminishing one, and the results should not surprise you.

For me, though, the most horrifying implication of Gunn’s argument was that to imagine that “love” can endure is foolish, almost wilfully so, and it is only weary sophisticates who understand that a relationship is in no small measure an exercise in expectation management. She prays in aid a recent interview with Dame Emma Thompson, on the Radio Times podcast; Thompson declared that “Romantic love is a myth and actually quite dangerous”. What she called the “happily ever after” narrative was a concoction, and she urged us to see long-term relationships as turbulent and to be endured and survived. Starting with her role in the new romantic comedy What’s Love Got To Do With It? (how agonisingly trite a title), she said:

Long-term relationships are hugely difficult and complicated. If anyone thinks that happy ever after has a place in our lives, forget it, and that’s what this film is about really.

Thompson drew on her own experiences to support her hypothesis. Her Ur-luvvie marriage to Sir Kenneth Branagh (1989-95) saw her “heart broken very badly”, which is a sad thing, and that she was the victim of Branagh’s infidelity with Helena Bonham Carter (after the two had co-starred in the fun-but-ropey Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) of course elicits my sympathy. Thompson is an obviously warm and empathetic figure, loved and respected in equal measure, I think, and certainly revered by some whom I in turn respect, like Stephen Fry.

It isn’t quite clear how her heart was so broken if romantic love is a “myth”. (I think it may be that she’s mistaken and so of course she was heart-broken.) But Thompson has been married to her current husband, the excellent Greg Wise, for 20 years. It’s awful to think she must regard that relationship as “hugely difficult”, and that those are the terms which spring first to her mind when she imagines her marriage. Perhaps she was playing up the difficulties because of her new film, but this idea that “romantic love is a myth” is, well, utter bollocks.

Look, let’s be honest. Of course we idealise romantic relationships. Of course we sometimes invest more in them than they can bear. Of course we are prone to pretending that they have a purity and a pristine nature which is not always the case. We probably idealise romantic love more than anything else, but then, what better experience is there to idealise? In any event, this does not negate the existence of the feeling itself. Gilding the lily does not mean that lilies are imaginary.

If Thompson is saying that I, that you, that anyone out there who thinks they have felt what we dub “romantic love” has been fooled, by society or by themselves, then I think she’s weirdly mistaken, rather patronising and alive only to a grim, plodding drudgery in interpersonal relationships. I also find it ever so slightly offensive: I know the times I have experienced “romantic love”, I can (to myself) grade and assess those experiences on a kind of internal scale, and to be told that I am too unsophisticated or wise to perceive the truth of those relationships is liable to make me respond that, however many Academy Awards and BAFTAs and Emmys and Golden Globes you may have, you can, respectfully, fuck right off.

Think about those experiences. Think of your first date with your current partner, or the first time you properly fell in love, or the best partner you ever had (sure, sure, it’s the one you’re with, I get it), and summon up even a fraction of the feelings you had. Powerful, isn’t it? The heart starts to pound more quickly, there is a fluttering in your chest like a caged bird against your ribs, you may see in your mind’s eye the setting exactly as it was or as you’ve come to recall it. It may be a hazy memory, woozy with the soft comfort of love, or it may be pin-sharp, hyper-aware, remembering vividly a scent or a sound or a physical sensation. Whether you’re brutally accurate or as self-deluding as a fairytale princess, that moment and the emotions which encircle it will be important. Now imagine Dame Emma Thompson telling you it’s a myth, you didn’t feel why you thought you felt, and you need to get with the programme, open your eyes to the world as it is and see no longer through a glass, darkly, but now face-to-face. How does that feel? Not good, I’m guessing; but also a little annoying?

It’s such an obvious fallacy. We all know love is real, because we’ve all felt it. We may tie ourselves in knots trying to agree on what “love” means, and it will have a nuance and a many-faceted shimmer which is unique to each of us: but it is manifestly a commonly recognised phenomenon. What Molly Gunn wants to do, whether to dim the contrast between an idealised marriage and what she finds herself going through, or because she thinks it is grown-up and brutally realistic to dismiss love and treat relationships as shared delusions, is dismantle completely the narrative of meeting, liking, loving and sharing. It seems like it is too much, it shines too harsh a light on her, if love can exist between other people. No, she has had the revelation, she understands where we do not. She will explain it all.

Even if I didn’t know with all my heart that love exists and is an emotion with awesome, frightening power to change the way people behave and the things people are willing to do, it would be obvious that her denial was absurd and that a thing which for convenience we label love absolutely exists. It is, after all, something we’ve been trying to describe and identify since our earliest expressions of narrative. It is one of the first things we seize upon and use as a narrative rock.

We’ve been doing this for millennia. One of the earliest love stories is The Love Song for Shu-Sin, part of a sacred rite from Mesopotamia in around 2,000 BC, and there is absolutely no doubt about the truth (and the easy recognition of it we feel) about romantic love.

You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.
Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,
You have captivated me, let me stand tremblingly before you.
Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.

If that is part of a myth, then myths are not myths at all but marble-like veins of truth which snake through our history. And we are still doing it. Look at the current music charts. At the top is Flowers by Miley Cyrus, and what is it about? Love, of course, a love found and a love lost. “We were good, we were gold/Kinda dream that can't be sold.” We all know that feeling, and it is a pointed message to Cyrus's ex-husband, Liam Hemsworth. If romantic love was a myth, even something as humdrum as a break-up song by the inexplicable Cyrus would have no resonance, would mean nothing, touch no hearts not stir any feelings. But of course it does.

I hope I don’t seem too obsessed with Molly Gunn’s awful article in The Times and (perhaps) the suffering of her poor husband, Tom Mangan. In truth, their relationship is a matter for them (except insofar as Gunn has propelled it into print), but what I could not abide was her attempt to tell us all that we had, essentially, got “love” wrong and she had a duty to educate us. I hate this recurring notion today that to understand huge matters of the heart and the mind properly is to see them through a cynical, jaded filter, that only scepticism is truly insightful. It’s rubbish, and it robs us of hope and joy and excitement.

Love is hard, sometimes. It can stay away for years, and maybe some people never experience it. It looks different to each one of us, and it can be a titanic effort even for a couple to agree on what they both mean, so that they can share it, and their lives. But, my God, it exists. Even Nietzsche, who was hardly an arch-romantic, knew this thing crackled between us, alive and elusive and intermittent, but unavoidable and irresistable. “There is always madness in love,” the gloomy Saxon philosopher wrote. “But there is also always some reason in madness.” How right he was.