Stuart Sandford, Cumface #6 (stuartsandford.co.uk)

Just so you know: love is a terrible thing.

It’s a distraction, like pornography.

It’s all-consuming, also like pornography.

In fact, love is a lot like pornography, except that love makes you worry, and porn doesn’t, unless you’re the sort of person who worries that you’re eating up too much space on your hard drive with videos organized into handy folders labeled with acronyms like ATM and ATOGM and MMMMFFT, in which case, love is totally, 100% EXACTLY like pornography.

Maybe the only way that love is NOT like pornography is in its gift of empathy.* Love has the unfortunate side-effect of making you identify with complete strangers, including fictional characters. Inside your love-addled brain, love reshapes the movies that you see, the TV shows, the commercials, casting you and your paramour in the roles of hero and victim. Love makes every zombie film a story of you and your honey, cheating death, every sweet undead goodbye a stab in your heart.

Love is even worse when it comes to newscasts of real-world tragedy. They’re almost unwatchable. I usually opt for Family Guy reruns, which don’t have the same effect at all, thankfully.

And yet: love is something that most people aspire to, while only a sliver of the population aspires to porn stardom. Seems like a conundrum to me. Perhaps more people would find love if they opted for careers in the adult entertainment industry. I should talk about that more next week….

* Actually, I once wrote a seminar paper arguing that pornography depends on empathy: it assumes that the viewer will identify with someone in the scene. But then I got distracted (not with love, but with hatred for my advisor) and moved on to other things, so I think I’ll drop the argument.