Joy Division’s song “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is bitter love song about how love will ruin a relationship. In book four of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, Lucretius takes a very unromantic view on love claiming that it will ruin you. It will make you stop working on the things you should be working on and you will become addicted to the sabotage you are bringing to your life. They both highlight the negatives of being in love—being addicted and hurt by this feeling that you can’t just get over. They both have these painfully negative views on what love does. It will ruin relationships and lives and bring nothing more than pain and sadness and lack of productivity.
Lucretius doesn’t discuss being scorned by love in his writing, though, whereas the Joy Division comes off as a someone being deeply hurt by a romantic love and things not working out. It sounds as if in the Joy Division song, the narrator once believed in love and is hurt that it didn’t work out or live up to what they had wanted. Lucretius just comes off as against the idea entirely without giving any background into his own experience with love.
“Remember too that the lover consumes his strength and is exhausted by the strain; remember that his life is ruled by another. His duties are neglected; his reputation totters and dwindles.” (1122-1124)