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The thought was a lonely one: of the error one may find over a single word, an argument not for linguistic pedants, but of desperate importance to lovers who need to make themselves understood. Chloe and I could both speak of being in love, and yet this love might mean significantly different things within each of us. We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different places: that they had been different books for each of us. Might the same divergence not occur over a single love-line? I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air - and not knowing if any of them would get through.

8. The whole language of love had been corrupted by overuse. When I listened to the radio in the car, my love fed effortlessly off the love songs that happened to be playing, for example, off the passion of a black American female singer, whose accent I took on (I was on an empty motorway) while Chloe became the lady's 'baby'.

Wouldn't it be nice To hold you in my arms And love you, baby? To hold you in my arms

Ob yeah and I say, I do, 1 say I love you baby?

9. How much of what I thought I felt for Chloe had been influenced by songs like these? Was my sense of being in love not just the result of living in a particular cultural epoch? Was it not society, rather than any authentic urge, that was motivating me to pride myself on romantic love? In previous cultures and ages, would I not have been taught to ignore my feelings for Chloe in the way I was now taught to ignore (more or less) the impulse to wear stockings or to respond to insult with a challenge to a duel?

'Some people would never have fallen 'in love if they had never heard of love,' aphorized La Rochefoucauld, and does not history prove him right? I was due to take Chloe to a Chinese restaurant in Camden, but declarations of love might have seemed more appropriate elsewhere given the scant regard traditionally given to love in Chinese culture. According to the psychological anthropologist L. K. Hsu, whereas Western cultures are 'individual-centred' and place great emphasis on emotions, in contrast, Chinese culture is 'situation-centred' and concentrates on groups rather than couples and their love (though the manager of the Lao Tzu was nevertheless delighted to take my booking). Love is never a given, it is constructed and defined by different societies. In at least one society, the Manu of New Guinea, there is not even a word for love. In other cultures, love exists, but is given distinctive forms. Ancient Egyptian love poetry had no interest in the emotions of shame, guilt, or ambivalence. The Greeks thought nothing of homosexuality, Christianity proscribed the body, the Troubadours equated love with unrequited passion, the Romantics made love into a religion, and the perhaps not-very-happily married S. M. Greenfield, in an article in the Sociological Quarterly which I had picked up at the dentist (I don't know what it was doing there either), wrote that love is today kept alive by modern capitalism only in order to:

. . . motivate individuals – where there is no other means of motivating them – to occupy the positions husband-father and wife-mother and form nuclear families that are essential not only for reproduction and socialization but also to maintain the existing arrangements for distributing and consuming goods and services and, in general, to keep the social system in proper working order and thus maintain it as a going concern.

10. The sickness, nausea, and longing that I had at times felt at the thought of Chloe might in some societies have been identified as signs of a religious experience. When St Teresa of Avila (1515-82), founder of the Discalced Carmelite Order, had a visit from an angel, she described an encounter which it would take a particularly open contemporary mind not to identify with an orgasm:

The angel was very beautiful, his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angels who seem to be all afire ... In his hands I saw a golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails ... The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one's soul be content with anything less than God.

11. In the end, I decided that a card with a giraffe might not be the best place to articulate my feelings – and that I should wait till dinner. At around eight, I drove to Chloe's apartment to pick her up and give her the present. She was delighted to find that I had heard her hints about the Piccadilly window, the only regret (tactfully delivered a few days later) was that it had been the blue and not the red pullover she'd really been pointing to (though receipts gave us a second chance, after I had tried to but been desisted from throwing myself out of the window).

12. The restaurant could not have been more romantic. All around us in the Lao Tzu, couples much like ourselves (though our subjective sense of uniqueness did not allow us to think so) were holding hands, drinking wine, and fumbling with chopsticks (a neighbour's cashew nut came at one point to rest on Chloe's lap).

'God, I feel better, I must have been starving. I've been so depressed all day,' said Chloe.

'Why?'

'Because I have this thing about birthdays, they always remind me of death and forced jollity. But actually, I think this one's turning out to be not so bad in the end. In fact, it's pretty all right, thanks to a little help from my friend.'

She looked up at me and smiled.

'You know where I was this time last year?' she asked. 'No, where?'

'Being taken out for dinner by my horrible aunt. It was awful, I kept having to go to the bathroom to cry, I was so upset that it was my birthday and the only person who'd invited me out was my aunt with this irritating stutter who couldn't stop telling me she didn't understand how a nice girl like me didn't have a man in her life. So it's probably no bad thing I ran into you..."

She really was adorable (thought the lover, a most unreliable witness in such matters). But how could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like love or devotion or infatuation were exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, by the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. At the moment when I most wanted language to be original, personal, and completely private, I came up against the irrevocably public nature of emotional communication.

The restaurant was of no help, for its romantic setting made love too conspicuous, hence insincere. There was a recording of Chopin's Nocturnes over the loudspeakers and a heart-shaped candle on the table. We overheard a man at the next table (perhaps a Darwinist) joking it should have been a penis. There seemed to be no way to transport love in the word L-O-V-E without at the same time throwing the most banal associations into the basket. The word was too rich in foreign history: everything from the Troubadours to Casablanca had cashed in on the letters. Was it not my duty to be the author of my own feelings? Would I not have to fashion a declaration with a uniqueness to match Chloe's? I felt disconcertingly aware of the mundanity of our situation: a man and a woman, lovers, celebrating a birthday in a Chinese restaurant, one night in the Western world, somewhere towards the end of the twentieth century. No, my meaning could never make the journey in L-O-V-E. It would have to seek alternative transportation.