I have spent much of the past decade talking to people about love. I make it clear that any type of love is a welcome topic but when I ask what love is, my interviewees often shoot straight to romantic love. This is partly down to the inadequacy of our language: that small word has to do a lot of heavy lifting. But it is also because of the multibillion-pound industry that has convinced us the search for “the one” is the be-all and end-all. Mention love and that’s where we immediately go. My idea was to start off with very universal experiences, like arriving in Berlin – anyone can do that, white, straight, whatever – and you’re reading it, you’re into it, so by the time something happens that is not specific to your experience, you’re already emotionally invested. I wanted to put the reader in a place where they would actually walk a mile in my shoes. This book is funny and sad and sexy and magic and beautiful and it loses a little of its energy when it leaves Berlin, but I didn’t mind. The poetry of the writing carries you along until it punches you right in the gut. Take your joy where you can. Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part

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Ha-nee reads the book “Love is Nonexistent” and ponders over the claims that it is fake and the implied truth that Dae-o abandoned Ae-jeong and her child. She speaks to her mother and tells her that everyone online is saying the novel is fake and that she knows the woman is based on her. Of course, Ms Song is the orchestrator of all of this. This is one last throw of the dice to stop Ae-jeong and Dae-o from concluding their relationship but it’s obvious it isn’t going to work. Episode 16 is going through the motions. It’s true The power of the romantic narrative to drive dating behaviour and commerce is clear but it may also have darker consequences. In 2017 the testimony of 15 women regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) was published. It was clear that one of the issues with IPV was the stories these women had heard about what love was. Love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs (even when you’re being abused). Love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for (even if they are violent). Lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end (even against the authorities who are trying to protect you). It is interesting to contemplate the power of our words. We speak without thinking but the stories we tell our children have consequences. Demographic data shows that the downgrading of romantic love is, to some extent, already happening. Figures from the Office for National Statistics and Relate show that by 2039, one in seven people in the UK will be living alone and today only one in six people believe in “the one”. In the years since, people would often ask you about Uganda, what it was like, and you would never really know what to say. If you had, you would have told them it was the place which taught you the extremes of joy and pain. And now, for better or worse, you are coming home. Many people will call it that, even those who should know better. It is not a bubble. A bubble is a carefully-sealed world whose occupants are oblivious to everything that happens beyonf: it. Berlin is something different. It is a refuge, an enclave, a safe haven. If Berlin were your bubble then that would mean you were incurious about whatever happened in other parts of the world. But you are acutely aware of those happenings, and that is why you are here. There is a very good chance that you are here because you fled the true bubbles of our societies—the small suburbs and villages where you were raised. where your difference was at best tolerated. There is a very good chance that those places, those bubbles, will resent how you see them now. that they will interpret your distance as elitism and snobbery as opposed to an essential act of self-protection. Those places, those bubbles, will not stop to think about what they did to you, that you were so traumatised that you had to flee at the earliest opportunity.

The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love, only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever. As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father’s death. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy. A heartfelt and intimate account of what it is to be human, especially right now. Coming up to the age at which his father died, the narrator is having something of a mid-life crisis, his career rewarding intellectually but not financially, failing to find love, and increasingly finding Berlin is not the refuge from racism he has hoped. A short one lent to me by my law student… nothing super radical but just a very honest and relatable story of loneliness and longing and growth and identity. Recommend! Ha-nee seems content on keeping up to date with the news — she’d rather know what everyone else is saying than not know. She tells her grandmother that the kids have not bullied her over it and actually, they’ve been nice. Ha-nee continues and states that she can tell Dae-o is not a bad man. Vom Sehen und Gesehenwerden, von Selbstbildern und Selbstzweifeln – Moshtari Hilal schreibt über Hässlichkeit

In the end, it was all about love. – poco.lit. In the end, it was all about love. – poco.lit.

The moment that haunts the early part of the book is the one he knows is coming steadily closer, when he passes his father’s age at his death: what are you? What have you achieved? You are a writer, making work that is far below his potential. I've never seen such a cohesive, sincere and resonating story about Berlin. It's a great book for a great city. Everyone (including me) had a "Berlin experience" moving in, but very few managed to build up the story on it. Movies, series and books about Berlin – no one will tell you so precisely about how is it to live here like Okwonga did. At the other end of the spectrum are the polyamorists. A group who experience romantic and sexual love with more than one partner. Again, the all-pervasive narrative of romantic love has led us to depict those who practise polyamory in a less than favourable light. They are characterised as being promiscuous, immoral, untrustworthy and dissatisfied.I have a great interest in Berlin, and am also keen to enlarge my reading of authors of colour, so this was a serendipitous find at my local library. Its most possible meaning is that it’s about time wasted on trying to build a relationship with a girl who doesn’t want to be with you. It’s a special team. The club I play for, the Unicorns, is set up with a specific charter of being anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist. The players are selected on being good at football, but also on being good people. We would have trials and then go for a drink at the pub with all the trialists to see what they’re like. Sometimes brilliant footballers would come to trial but wouldn’t be invited to the squad because they aren’t gentle people. The book is divided into small vignette style pieces, all focusing on a different section of the author’s life in Berlin and his past actions in London and Uganda. These range from the importance of therapy, racism, the different types of cakes one finds in Berlin to the minimalist architecture. At times it’s gently humorous, sometimes it poignant. Musa Okwonga is also a poet and there are some poets which also express the author’s feelings about Berlin.