There are several merits to considering oneself “in love”. It’s something to say at dinner parties or when called upon to emote. It gives one the semblance of being a functional human being. It can lend an extra piquancy to the sex. It justifies the time devoted to not especially riveting stretches endured with one person. In short, it is a facilitatingly self-justifying notion. One can see why there’s so much of this sort of protestation about.
Scratch the surface, however, and one may be less in love than in vanity. They would appear to love you after all and, in the manner of a L’Oréal ad, you consider yourself worth it. It is amusing to constitute the object of another’s affections and only polite to harbour affectations in return. The idea of being in love yields meaning where meaning may be thin on the ground.
The test comes in the parting. Separate from a loved one and there will be physical smarting: one’s chest will tighten, breath drag and very face ache. Months, years later, the engulfing panic may recur.
Where love hurts, blunted pride pricks for anywhere between half an hour to the best part of an afternoon. How dare they do this to you, even if they have merely concurred? How could they bring themselves to live without you? This genre of break-up bursts like a balloon in the face; a small yet vaguely embarrassing jolt, leaving one with the furtive and not entirely comfortable feeling that one’s vanity has been broken.