Forms of Love in the Delirium Trilogy

Since love is at the center of the battle in the Delirium series, it’s no surprise that relationships are of the utmost importance.  In this world, love has been given a new name, amor deliria nervosa, and it’s been branded a disease, a putrefaction, a subversion.  Those who refuse the cure for the disease are driven out of society and forced to survive in brutal, spartan conditions if they’re lucky, locked away to rot or executed for dissidence if they’re not.  It stands to reason that, in order to risk so much and defy everything one has ever known, it requires a force like love urging them forward.  (Some spoilers.)

As such, we know it’s only a matter of time before Lena, who’s been obsessively counting the days until her cure, falls in love with a boy and realizes the agony and ecstasy for which the uncured throw everything away.  It’s no surprise that meeting Alex is her awakening to what life can truly be, as well as how broken and festering her society is, and she breaks faith with all she’s ever been taught in order to cast her lot with him.  However, the series doesn’t leave love as clearcut as that.  Lena’s relationship with Alex isn’t her salvation, and it’s threatened by the people who fear it.  After the first book, the story becomes about carrying on despite the loss of love, about standing for the right to love in and of itself, rather than just the right to love a specific person.  It edges toward the possibility of loving again after love lost, opening your heart to someone new even as you’re still blinded by the dazzle of that first love.  I’m not crazy about how things shake out on this front in the third book, but I still appreciate the way the series as a whole explores love in a more complex way; for a young adult series, that’s pretty laudable.

But what I really appreciate is that this fight isn’t only for romantic love.  While romance gets the most dedicated focus, other forms of love are just as forbidden, and people who find themselves struck by them will give up just as much for their right to feel it.  I like Lena’s repeated remembrances of her mother, who endured several failed procedures and was lost to Lena in childhood.  There are some great notes about how Lena’s mother is regarded suspiciously by other parents for the way she behaves with her other children.  Other mothers don’t sing, Lena realizes in retrospect, and when young Lena scrapes her knee and the sidewalk and her mother holds and comforts her, she’s practically committing a public indecency.  In this world, a woman’s love for her daughters is called a disease.  Similarly, I love the story of how young Raven winds up running away to the Wilds.  Happening upon an infant Blue, abandoned and near death, Raven gives herself over to this baby so fully and so immediately that she leaves her entire life behind her.  If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.

I’m grateful for that.  As an aromantic, I don’t experience romantic love, and if that was the only kind of love explored in the book, I would have felt pretty left out.  I mean, don’t get me wrong – romantic love is all over stories in every medium, and I’m used to seeing plenty of it.  But when the obvious thesis of the story is “love is right and healthy, and those who try to take it away are the ones who are sick and wrong,” I’d be a little uncomfortable if I felt I had more in common with the “non-love” side.  Not that I’d run around advocating the cure, but if it was only for romantic love, I wouldn’t see getting cured as any great loss for me personally.  By including more all-encompassing forms of love, like familial love and friendship, the book includes stakes that would apply to me as well, and I like that.