Love Rules

1. Thou shalt fall in love, or grow in love, to be in love.

2. Sex is not the be-all and end-all of a relationship.

3. Is there only one meaning to fidelity?

4. Friends pull you through every relationship - bad or good.

I truly loved this book - not just because it came free with a magazine I purchased in Heathrow airport, but because it was such a refreshing read. Chick-lit, the good ones that is, offer great balm for the chicky soul. And this one is no different.

Love Rules by Freya North. Story revolves around 4 people - Alice Heggarty and Thea Luckmore who are best friends, Mark who has loved Alice through various boyfriends and eventually becomes her husband, and Saul Mundy who becomes Thea's fairytale-prince. Yeah, the names are hard to remember, but you get pulled into their lives rather quickly.

Alice is one girl who loves falling for lust. So she runs through many many boyfriends because obviously, like Rule no. 2, sex is not everything. Finally, she realizes that there's this guy waiting in the sidelines ever-so-patiently to marry her (it's been Mark's life-long dream, really). So Alice proposes to Mark - yes! They get married. He's rich, has a well-paying job, even owns a Lexus, is a neat man who tidies up after Alice, and puts up with all sorts of womanly-nonsense from her. (Apparently Alice doesn't even know how to set up the canggih DVD player in the super nice house Mark bought for them). He loves Alice to bits. But, with all his work-travelling, Alice begins to feel lonely. And ta-da, things start to happen. Alice begins breaking the love rules one by one.

Thea is Alice's stabilizer best friend. She believes in fairytale love, that one day she'll find someone who loves her for who she is, and she'll love him as much back. She meets Saul, who falls incredibly deeply in love with her. It becomes rather like a fairytale, actually, because they fit each other so well. But, of course, what is a book without some dramatic interventions?

The plot is nothing very much to shout about. But, the writing is. I particularly loved the conversation pieces between Alice and Thea, because these were the parts which dissected morality, what's wrong and what's right in love, whether one set of principles are better than the other set. But, for all the morals in the story, one rule ruled supreme : that good friends pull you through everything.

There's one particular part though in the book that I've thought and thought about. But I can't dissect it here without spoilers. Just generally though ... if you're truly in love with the one you're with, but you occasionally look for sex elsewhere, does that step into the boundaries of fidelity? You'll find the answer (or more questions) in the book, muahahaha ...