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“How Do You Spell Love?”—“You Don’t Spell It. You Feel It.”

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Abstract

This famous quote from Winnie-the-Pooh reveals something fundamental about the role love stories play in the lives of people. That they do, is beyond doubt, as the theme of love pervades all of literature. And this interest in the topic of love has not waned. Publishing love stories is a multi-billion business. Apparently humans are not content with loving and being loved; they also want to read about other people’s love. Why?

In this chapter we propose several motifs for reading about love in fiction, based on insights from sexology and expert relation therapy. Love stories apparently transfer experiences through the written word into meaningful experiences that, although knowingly fictional, nevertheless are of the utmost importance to readers. After presenting some data on love literature and basic impediments to human love relations, we offer some escape routes from desire (through death, divorce, and extramarital affairs), arguing that the road to desire in relations is hardly represented in fictional literature, with one exception, what we call “the magic of love”. With this we mean that in reading literature words have to be pronounced ad verbatim so that, similarly to magical practices, they produce the desired effect on the reader.

In a final section we reflect on the urgent need to investigate reading about love through more rigorous, empirical, research methods than the speculative ones employed so far in literary studies.

Keywords

Love Rationale for love stories Effects of reading Love stories Evolutionary perspective on love Relation therapy 
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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of English Philology and TranslationBorys Grinchenko Kyiv UniversityKievUkraine
  2. 2.Faculty of Languages and LiteraturesLudwig Maximilian UniversityMunichGermany

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