From a Fantasy to True Love – A Learning Process
by Kate Fierro
Every relationship has the potential to be a learning experience. We discover things about ourselves and our partners, and we learn to fit together in unique ways that will never be exactly the same in any other relationship. We grow and mature as we learn, and so do our emotions. We may not, technically, learn to love – I believe that’s an ability inherent to human nature – but we do learn about love and relationships. Or, if we flip it: our partners and lovers won’t teach us how to love or how to feel love, but they may just teach us something about our emotions.
Love Starved starts with a simple, yet seemingly impossible request: “Show me what it’s like to feel loved.” Micah, a successful man in his late twenties, doesn’t ask the escort he hires to teach him how to feel love – he just wants one night to experience what he’d always imagined as that perfect romantic state of being “loved, wanted, cared for, like [he’s] the center of someone’s universe.” What he ultimately gets from the whole experiment is so much more than that, and yet not what he’d been picturing at all.
When I was writing Love Starved, I wanted to play with the concept of fantasies – things we imagine, often in great detail; things we dream of, and maybe assume we can never have – and how, if we decide to pursue these fantasies, they can turn out different from what we visualized. It’s true both in regard to sexual fantasies (someone getting aroused by the idea of a BDSM scene or a threesome may not actually enjoy it if they try it in reality) and dreams connected with other areas of our lives. Dreams and fantasies are, after all, subjective, idealized things.
Micah comes into his arrangement with Angel with certain preconceptions about love – beliefs based on literature and pop culture, on observing other relationships around him, as well as on his own limited experiences. He hires Angel, certain he knows what he wants. And he does, in a very narrow way. But during the course of the story, he gets so much more than that, and learns not just about feeling love, but about giving it as well.
So yes, learning and teaching things about love may be considered one of the themes in my book, but I wouldn’t say it’s about teaching anyone how to feel love. Rather, it’s about showing what love can be and how many different forms it can take; that it’s not a one-size-fits-all, unchanging thing. And in the end, the teaching goes both ways. Both men show each other things about love that they’ve never believed possible; things that change them and their lives.
I hoped to capture the personal and emotional growth that comes from all kinds of good, solid relationships between people – not just romantic relationships, but friendships, work and family relations, too. Have I succeeded? I will leave that for the readers to judge.
About Love Starved
Micah Geller considers himself lucky: at 27, he has more money than he needs, a job he loves, a debut book coming out, and a brilliant career in information security before him. What he doesn’t have is a partner to share it with—a fact that’s never bothered him much.
But the romantic in him isn’t entirely dead. When a moment of weakness finds him with a contact to a high-class escort specializing in fulfilling fantasies, Micah asks for only one thing.
Show me what it’s like to feel loved.
Available at: Amazon
About Kate Fierro
Kate Fierro spent ten years translating, editing, and reviewing other people’s words before making an impulse decision to write down some of her own. She hasn’t been able to stop ever since. Kate lives in Europe and is bilingual, with more love for her adopted language than her native one.
With nearly a million words under her belt, Love Starved is Kate’s debut novel.
Find out more about Kate on her Website or Twitter.
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