Author Website
Jaime Pasquier
Author Storyteller Researcher
The Laws of Desire
Ovid's Art of Love, Rebuilt for the Age of the Dating App
He thought love was a siege. He thought you took the city.
The Ars Amatoria, Rebuilt for the Age of the Dating App
Two thousand years ago, a Roman poet named Ovid wrote a manual on seduction. He was witty, cynical, and enormously popular. He was also, eventually, exiled. His book taught men how to find a woman and how to keep her, and then, in a third book, taught women how to defend themselves against everything he had just explained. The Laws of Desire is that book, rebuilt for the age of the dating app.
Why Ovid's Metaphor Was Wrong
What makes a person worth loving cannot be strategized into existence.
Three Books, One Argument
Two parts speak to men and one to women, and none of them is a self-help manual.
It offers no five-step programs. It is a long, wry look at what we actually do to each other, and why we keep doing it. Ovid is not the guide here. He is the specimen.
Along the way, the book looks at:
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The profile photo, the read receipt, and the sixth first date of the month
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The vanity, the waiting, and the small humiliations we endure to be wanted
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Why presence is not a technique
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Why the only campaign worth waging is the one conducted on yourself
The scenery has changed. The human material is stubbornly identical.
From the Colonnades to the Profile Photo
The colonnades of Rome have become the glow of a phone screen, and the lover waiting at the doorstep has become a profile photo and a read receipt.
Ovid believed that desire was a campaign: study the terrain, choose your tactics, take the city. This book argues that the metaphor was wrong then and is wrong now.
What it finds instead is simpler and harder. We want to be wanted, we endure small humiliations to get there, and the person most worth loving is the one who has done the work on himself or herself first.
A Note from the Author
I did not write this as a guide. I wrote it as a reader of Ovid who watched the dating app replace the colonnade, and noticed that nothing underneath had changed.
Read the Book
Start with the question Ovid never asked: what makes a person worth loving?
Secure your copy and begin the argument.
