The Book of Love

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The Book of Love is a record of the human experience of love. Its first volumes date back to between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago (general record keeping wasn’t such a big thing at that time, so exact dates are hard to verify). The development, collection, and storage of these materials is a very mysterious affair. It is very uncommon to come across a Book of Love volume titled as such, but some of the more interesting volumes occasionally enter the general circulation under a variety of other names.

One volume of The Book of Love is created for each human couple in love (specifically, in what English-speakers in 2011 call “romantic” love). This, Volume 3,257,903,876 of The Book of Love, contains content concerning the relationship between Audrey Hamelers, a human female born in Maryland, United States, in the year 1986, and Daniel Beck, a human male born in California, United States, in the year 1985.

What Daniel Loves

Happiness of Time Together vs.
Time Apart

Fact: If we got married on December 13, 2013, we’d be getting married on the first Friday 13 to fall on that date since the one we began dating on, keeping both our anniversary and our floating semi-anniversary.

Fact: You have to admit that would be convenient.

The Kitchen Waltz

Beyond the creation of music, quite a bit of artistic effort has been exerted for the purpose of generating romantic feelings, or because romantic feelings were generated in the artist. Many great works of art in all artistic fields—including drawing, painting, sculpting, writing, and even architecture—just to name a few, have been created due to the power of love, or at least the power of the feelings someone got when they looked for a long time at someone really, really, really attractive.

Prior to the development of human language, volumes of The Book of Love primarily comprised images, transcriptions of mating calls, and diagrams of various mating dances. Only a very few of these describe anything exceptional, and those are only interesting to cultural anthropologists.

After humans entered the period of behavioral modernity some 50,000 years ago, the volumes primarily became records of some truly inane small-talk between lovers too busy looking dopily at each other to do or say anything at all interesting. A good half of the volumes describe relationships between people who were not only exceedingly dull, but were also remarkably horrible.

Only a paltry few volumes contain love stories that speak so well to the human condition that they interest more than five people out of a thousand. All in all, The Book of Love doesn’t make for very exciting or engrossing reading.

But, you may find this particular volume engrossing if you happen to be one of the main characters.