A Certain Hunger divides love into several categories: physical love, romantic love, love of food (writing, other appetites), and love of self. In Dorothy’s case, each form of love is taken to extremes, except her romantic stint with the man she actually falls in love with.

Her descriptions of love alternate between scorn, bemusement, bewilderment, and boredom. She writes, “It’s an unreadable mess” (13). She represents love as a complicating factor in life that morphs from doodles in the margins to the heights of an epic, if confusing and unresolvable, story. In essence, love is something she does not want or feel that she needs, and she perhaps only finds some form of it with Emma because they are both women resisting a stereotypical life. As such, they understand each other.

Ultimately, true romantic love is something that Dorothy finds and then rejects. Love, via her rejection of Andrew, is a symbol of her commitment to herself and her appetites. Romantic love symbolizes a facet of humanity that Dorothy thought she could not experience. When she does find it, she dismisses it as a threat to her identity.