T. C. Boyle's Modern Love

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Love is just a man-made construct created to justify our decadence. Human are hedonistic animals: we always seek pleasure. Truthfully, we are inherently selfish, caring for only our own well-being, and even if we say we love without costs, we love because it gives us the utmost pleasure: the pursuit of happiness.
Look at the magical world of Disney, all the princesses ‘fell in love’ to escape their dreadful lives, either being an oppressed slave to her step-family, having an obsessive mother who wants to kill you, or having a miserable curse. In Modern Love, T.C.Boyle described a love between the narrator and an obsessive, germaphobe girl. Why did this love exist? Simply, because of the fear of being alone. The narrator is described as “a …show more content…

An escape pod. Why is Breda so obsessed with being clean? Using the child-latent-sexual desire research from psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, Kipnis stated that desires for love or “searching for” love comes from “a deeply buried trove of childhood memories or injuries” (Kipnis 33.) Maybe, she experienced a traumatic incident as a child or in the past--like having a close person around her die because of an infestation of pathogenic germs. This event stayed with her and manifested to her love life. With social pressure “beaming into our psyches” (Kipnis 34) cultivating us to interweave happiness with couple’s love, Breda attempted to enter into the so-called realm of salvation and “happiness” depicted by society’s “lovestruck couples” like when she said “I love you” combined with “I think” (Boyle.) However, her pursuit of happiness was not love (like how society forced us to believe) but the isolation of germs. Thus, she didn’t settle with the narrator’s “athlete’s foot,” “psoriasis,” and “eczema” (Boyle), and prioritize her dream of a germ-free life. Her love was priority love unlike the narrator's setting love. Thus, their relationship failed. In a way, love is just falling into our desires be it: comfort, attention, or

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