"Love is a confidence trick, that's all. Nature's way of suckering a mammal with a brain and a long vulnerable gestation period into reproducing. Humans can think so ordinary animal-grade maternal instinct wouldn't be enough to make human women go through all that, not if they stopped and thought about what's involved. So you have love. It's a substitute for rational thought; look at it that way, it's the complete antithesis of what being human is all about. Humans can make choices, it's what makes them unique. Love takes all your choices away, and there you suddenly are. Worse still love inevitably leads to the worst pain of all, when you lose the people you love."
--Death talking to Miel Ducas, from K.J. Parker's Evil for Evil
Sci-fi author K. J. Parker's steampunk engineer trilogy, Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, and The Escapement is a fabulous study in human nature... and shoes, and hunting, and weapons of mass destruction, and war. I could go on, but really, you should just go read them.
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