Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late

Darian Leader takes a set of everyday puzzles about love and turns them into psychoanalytic questions: why lovers make promises late at night, why some people feel compelled to rescue their partners, why men so often count things, and what the Oedipus complex looks like from a woman's position. Working in a Lacanian register, he treats these small behaviours as clues to the structure of desire, seduction and fidelity rather than as habits to be corrected.

The chapters move by association, drawing on Freud, Lacan and a wide range of literary and clinical examples. Leader is less interested in what people should do than in what their choices and symptoms reveal about how demand and desire are organised.

For a clinician, the book models a way of listening to ordinary complaints about relationships and hearing the unconscious logic beneath them. It was published by Faber in 1997, following his earlier essays on the same terrain.