Love and Lies
An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A provocative and unsettling look at the nature of love and deception
Is it possible to love well without lying? At least since Socrates's discourse on love in Plato's Symposium, philosophers have argued that love can lead us to the truth—about ourselves and the ones we love. But in the practical experience of erotic love—and perhaps especially in marriage—we find that love and lies often work hand in hand, and that it may be difficult to sustain long-term romantic love without deception, both of oneself and of others.
Drawing on contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience, his own personal experience, and such famed and diverse writers on love as Shakespeare, Stendhal, Proust, Adrienne Rich, and Raymond Carver, Clancy Martin—himself divorced twice and married three times—explores how love, truthfulness, and deception work together in contemporary life and society. He concludes that learning how to love and loving well inevitably requires lying, but also argues that the best love relationships draw us slowly and with difficulty toward honesty and trust.
Love and Lies is a relentlessly honest book about the difficulty of love, which is certain to both provoke and entertain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Martin (How to Sell) probes the insidious relationship between lying and love in a sometimes frustrating but often brilliant book, extolling the ways in which lying can make us better lovers. This is no easy how-to manual, though; Martin's sources include Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche, among others. One of his most provocative proposals is that we first discover the intertwined relationship between love and deception as children. Remembering his own experience of first love, Martin argues that this process often involves an element of self-deception. In his view, the connection between lying and love is not necessarily bad: "Most of the deceptions we practice in erotic love do not have the goal of harming the beloved." In the end, Martin asserts, "How, when, and why we sort out the right kind of lying from the right kind of truth telling... are a lifetime's pursuit." At times, his tone comes across as overly lofty, and at others, emotionally inauthentic readers may suspect he is less worldly than he suggests. Nonetheless, Martin's conclusions about the nature of love and lies succeed in boldly challenging conventional views.
