While religion can lead to monumental discoveries about oneself, it can also lead to immense guilt, as acknowledged in The Love Object. The Englishman she is having an affair is with, showed up when Martha was about to go on a movie date with another man. By asking her, “Has any man ever told you that to see a woman you desire when you cannot do a thing about it leaves you with an ache?”, which led to Martha being reminiscent and upset on her current date with a man she did not wish to spend time with. “The ache conveyed itself to me and stayed all through the theater”, Martha thought while reflecting on how sad her Englishman’s eyes were when she told him about the date. The Englishman has a wife and Martha is expected to be fine with this.…show more content… Her upbringing syncs with this notion of love she is obsessed with because she never acquired it growing up. O’Brien, whose “father was a gambler and a drinker: violent, unpredictable and thwarted”, most likely led her to produce her most beautiful art and gave her fatherly issues. When O’Brien was 18 years old, she ran off with Ernest Gébler who was almost twice her age, and said, “I was also quite afraid of the person I'd gone to. He was older, and quite stern, and very complicated, and also a writer: as Chekhov said, writers shouldn't marry other writers”. Although there are no absolute claims in this interview that her marrying this older, difficult man correlates with her misguided relationship with her father, which all stemmed from a fatherly absence in her life growing up. Due to this abandonment she felt from her father, Edna O’Brien and the characters she wrote about in her short stories, specifically in “The Love Object”, never knew what it was like to feel true love. They were only longing to fill the void the people of the past left empty. “Obsession, like addiction, sets in motion a self-fueling and potentially endless cycle. Love and obsession are, in a sense, opposites. Obsession feeds on itself, is self-absorbed, while love reaches beyond the self toward authentic contact with another”, as claimed by Kiera O’Hara in her short, yet dense, chapter in Studies in Short
