Love is a Fallacy

A Reaction Paper

Max Schulman’s short story entitled Love is a Fallacy depicts some aspect of reality about

romance with a touch of humor. This work is indeed something reckoning. It narrates an egoistic young

man’s pursuit for the girl named Polly Espy that he wanted as his wife with the use of logic. The narrator

highly regards himself that he thinks his intellect makes him an eligible boyfriend and a husband

among the rest, only to end up failing to get the girl because of his ways.

As I’ve seen it, the protagonist ultimately failed because his self-centered nature made him

focus on his own needs and wants for a wife while disregarding what characteristics a man should be

to make a lady fall in love with him. As what the famous saying says, “Love is a two-way street”, you

do not build up romantic relations by focusing on yourself. Each must take in consideration the feelings

of another. Love is where you dive deeper on each other’s soul. It is where you discover what lies

beyond the surface of a person, beyond the beauty that the eyes can see and beyond what logic can

understand. Indeed, when logic talk of Love, it would deduce it as a fallacy, but when we talk of love

as a human person, it is something that is hopeful and beautiful.

Despite the protagonist’s unlikable character, I remained expectant of what would be the

story’s end. What I liked the most are the introduction of different fallacies in logic, and the author

indirectly implied thru the narration how love and logic cannot coexist. The story wasn’t just

entertaining but also informative and very thought provoking.