Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw. ↗
Sex is like washing your face - just something you do because you have to. Sex without love is absolutely ridiculous. Sex follows love, it never precedes it. ↗
No, actually 'The Host' was totally a palate-cleanser for me. I wanted to do something a little bit different than romantic love. Romantic love is in there, obviously, because I enjoy writing about that and living it a lot. ↗
The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity. ↗