Lovely War

“She is arrestingly beautiful. Impossibly perfect.” 

Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, passion, and love, is characterized as impossibly, alluringly beautiful. The gods around her, including her husband, Hephaestus, assume that this gift brings her joy. Instead, her perfection is a source of pain for her, as she feels that gods—in their inhuman perfection—cannot love in the same way that mortal humans, damaged and broken as they are, can.

“It’s because they’re weak and damaged that they can love. […] We need nothing. They’re lucky to need each other.”

The perfection of gods leaves Aphrodite ultimately alone, because none of them can truly love her or be loved. She shares the stories of James and Hazel and Aubrey and Colette to illustrate to her husband her unexpected envy of the lives of ordinary humans. Aphrodite’s stories position readers to wonder whether love is indeed transcendent and magnificent.

“‘Yeah, well, they die,’ Ares points out.”

The gods debate whether humans and their relationships are ultimately ubiquitous and unimportant, or whether every story of love is unutterably beautiful and unique. Ares, the god of war, sneeringly derides mortals as uninteresting and unimportant. His lack of interest in the human romances illustrates Aphrodite’s belief that Hephaestus has a more loving heart than his brother.