(Love Means Never Having to Say...) I'm Sorry, Sebastian

I think I might have been a little harsh on Sebastian Faulks in my post Glitterature.  The first programme in his series Faulks on Fiction was about the hero and seemed to be more travelogue than treatise, but I have just watched his episode about lovers in literature and he had some interesting things to say. Below, I've summarised some thoughts which struck me as helpful to anyone who is contemplating writing about love.

• Given that the main narrative thrust of a story is change in one shape or another, falling in love can be a fantastically transformative experience and therefore a good agent for change.
• A character who needs to be saved from themselves is an extremely attractive prospect and is often the premise on which many relationships, both in fiction and the real world, are based.
• You need both sex and love to create intimacy. Exploring flawed relationships in which one of these is not fully present can give you plenty of literary mileage.
• Society may have changed the obstacles in the way of a happy outcome in love, but the largest barriers remain internal. People have to overcome their own neuroses or bad experiences in order to have a chance of happiness.

If you want to explore some of these ideas in a short story, try writing something on the theme that the end of an affair is present even in its beginnings and see where that takes you...