If it were up to general social expectations, life would always follow the same tension curve: you start alone, go on a search - and find a partner.

A life without this story, without the kiss of Lady and the Tramp with pasta and candlelight, is hardly imaginable even in childhood.

And so Georgia, the protagonist of Alice Oseman's young adult novel "Loveless", has had a veritable overdose of romance: she reads cheesy novels and watches Baz Luhrmann's kitsch fireworks "Moulin Rouge" with her two best friends over and over again.

She just doesn't fall in love - even if she wants to.

Because Georgia, as she will discover in the course of this book, is aromantic and asexual: she feels no physical or romantic attraction to other people.

Anna Vollmer

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Most people realize that love is not as easy as literature and movies often make it out to be.

Relationships break up, passions go unrequited, sure.

But the belief that it only takes a little more time, just a little more searching, to find happiness leaves very few.

That romantic love doesn't have to mean happiness for everyone, however, is so far removed from our social reality that Georgia, for whom this is true, can't believe it herself.

This makes their personal discovery process, their coming out, all the more difficult.

"Loveless" belongs to young-adult literature, a genre in which the search and finding of love is central.

And in fact, Oseman, who tells a fictionalized version of her own experiences at Durham University, makes use of all conceivable conventions that this field has to offer: confusion and apparently fatal misunderstandings, grand gestures and reconciliation.

It's a pretty wise decision, because it elevates life without a partner as something as storytelling, suspenseful, and, yes, exhilarating as a classic love story.

And it allows you to talk about a topic that hardly ever occurs in social discourse with ease, in the best sense of the word in a way that is suitable for the masses.

When the search for togetherness is futile

Which, by the way, is surprising.

Because you don't even have to be asexual to feel the social pressure that weighs on anyone who doesn't currently have a partner to show for it.

The compelling thing about "Loveless" is how accurately Oseman depicts dialogue and situations that accompany family gatherings, student parties, but also conversations between friends over and over again.

Words of comfort (“One day you will meet someone. You just haven’t found the right person yet.”) are well meant, but always characterized by the assumption that the other person is also searching.

"Loveless," on the other hand, asks the much rarer but also more interesting question: what if you want to stay alone?

Georgia will learn as the story progresses that her quest for togetherness is futile.

And that this realization “wasn't a 'giving up' at all.

It was acceptance.” As a title, Loveless is misleading in the sense that life without a partner doesn't mean life without love.

For Georgia, it's her best friends who take the place of a caring, even loving, relationship of equals.

And so "Loveless" fits well into its own genre: Because a friendship can be just as beautiful as a kiss by candlelight.

Alice Oseman: "Loveless".

Novel.

Translated from English by Vanessa Walder.

Loewe Verlag, Bindlach 2022. 480 p., br., €14.95.

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