From my standpoint: I've just slogged through a lot of mind numbing detail which I assumed was building a case somehow, only to find at the end of the article that the vast bulk of it was irrelevant, and that the final conclusions are weak and/or obvious.
In other words, high effort to read, low information density.
In 1992, Jeanette Winterson, one of the hottest young authors of the early 1990s, published Written on the Body. Critics loved it, but none of them seem to have picked up on what I thought the book was about: The question of whether reason in love is good for you.
It isn't meant as a universal treatement. It's one person's problem: The narrator keeps falling in love the same way, leading through the same patterns of behavior. Self-deception makes it exciting; the gradual dawning of self-awareness makes it intolerable yet doesn't help stop the cycle.
The book's main character is never named, and his/her gender never identified. (I'm going to use "ze, zer", from here on, because "him/her" just isn't working.) This seems like a pretentious trick at first, but it's part of the novel's purpose to strip love of its clichés, associations, and roles, and report its movements and actions accurately, like a war correspondent. The narrator sometimes speaks in third person, sometimes in second; and this also has a purpose which is revealed at the end. There's no way to do this without spoilers, so I'll go ahead and tell you that the narrator talks to zer final passionate love in third person when reporting what happened, and in second person when only imagining her there in zer final madness.
The narrator is an aging Lothario, a serial philanderer, who moves from one lover to another, married and unmarried, but usually married. It's married women who understand zer—they, like the narrator, have grown bored or desperate in their comfortable marriages whose flames have died down.
The only difference is that they can make it last 10 years, while for our narrator, passion seldom lasts past six months.
The narrator has carried on in this way long enough to realize what's happening, to recognize the same lame excuses and clichés trotted out at the opening and closing of every new relationship. This unwelcome self-awareness intrudes on zer script, making zer stumble and flub the lines. Finally recognizing that they are lines is what makes everything terribly hard that used to happen naturally and easily:
The intrusion of reason on love, the narrator seems to believe, is the source of zer confusion.
The narrator is once again convinced that now it is time to settle down, and have a true and lasting love. Ze settles down with a woman named Jacqueline who does not incite passion, of whom ze says,
The narrator, as always, meets another married woman, Louise, who seizes zer imagination. Ze knows exactly what is happening and where it will end, and tries to be reasonable—here ze has zer first genuine chance at "happiness", as people name it, with Jacqueline, and knows perfectly well that the passion ze now feels for Louise won't last, but can't reason zerself into feeling any differently.
And ze dives in as always, following zer usual script:
Ze breaks the news to Jacqueline:
And then the unthinkable happens: Ze has zer torrid affair with Louise, and then she departs from the script and the narrator realizes how deeply ze's been fooling zerself all zer life:
Louise leaves her husband Elgin for the narrator.
And then the one unexpected thing happens that could break our narrator out of zer endless cycle of love and boredom. Louise gets terminal cancer. Her husband, a cancer specialist, convinces the narrator that he can make her well—if the narrator casts her out, and she comes back to him. Ze does. Months later, unable to stand the separation, ze confronts Elgin and demands to see Louise. But Elgin thought Louise had left him for zer again. No one knows where she is. No one knows whether she is alive or dead. Our narrator's relationship has been cut off in the passionate stage, with no closure possible. Yet another woman, Gail, appears, another comfortable woman, who understands there is no passion between them but tells zer to be reasonable and settle down by the fire. Our narrator is stuck on Louise, unable to move on, perhaps forever.
And it seems, at the ending, that this is the choice, and only zer helpless, transfixed state can finally enable zer to "settle down" to zer compromise "happy ending" with Gail, having the comfortable woman to drink tea and share a bed with, and the passionate affair that can never die in zer memory.
The interesting question at the end is whether the narrator would've been better off without so much self-awareness, if ze had been able to continue the cycle of love and betrayal until death or wearing zerself out, never having more than animal awareness of the process. Winterson suspends judgement throughout the novel but comes down a little heavy-handed against reason on the final page, making it drive the narrator mad in the end. Free of reason, there would have been at least intervals of self-deluded happiness.
There's another interpretation. There is no hint that Winterson had this in mind, but the dilemma above is a bit of a cheat, as the narrator is someone who obviously could've benefited from polyamory. Zer loves never allowed that choice. Each of zer loves expected a love triangle to be unstable and eventually demanded a return to the "normality" of a single love, even if "love" was not quite the word for it. From this perspective, it is the tragedy of a person whose reason was never free, whose downfall was dictated by society's false clichés about love and marriage despite the impossibility of reconciling them with zer reality. The lesson is then that reason is best, and instinct will do, but something in-between, instinct plus a crippled reason that takes itself as seriously as if it were the real thing, leads to madness.