Mel suffers from self-certitude or rectitude, the conviction of that he is
right, which is a drug clouding his powers of reason and his ability to see the
truth. As a result of his love for hearing the sound of his own bloviating
voice and the certitude that his voice affords him, Mel thinks he knows the
“higher truth” of love. But to the contrary, he is delusional in his
orientation toward love, both in his ideas and his actions. In fact, the story
pits Mel’s delusion of love, an oversimplification rooted in idealism, with the
reality of love, a messy tangle of complexities and contradictions that rebel
against Mel’s easy truisms and aphorisms about love.
Mel
believes in idealized love, which ironically is a standard of love he fails
miserably, while the story shows there are dozens of types of love, which defy
easy classification:
1.
chimera love
2.
chivalry love
(heroic or selfless or altruistic love)
3.
honeymoon or infatuation
love
4.
platonic love
5.
demonic love (the
underbelly of obsessed love)
6.
Mel’s self-love
or narcissism
Mel's ultimate delusion is that he is obsessed in love. In fact, he disdains love and prefers his Self to all else. Sadly, Mel has convinced himself that he is interested in love when in fact his real interest is to erect a superior knowledge of love that he can use to rub others' noses in.
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