Sentimentality is an accusation leveled against unearned emotion. Oscar Wilde summed up the indignation: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” Artificial sweeteners grant the same intensity—sweeter than sugar itself—without the price: no tax of calories. They offer the shell of sugar without its substance; this feels miraculous and hideous at once.

This isn’t to say that sweeteners are the same as sentimentality—or even a perfect symbol for it—but simply to suggest that a similar fear is operative in these different spheres of taste. Both terms describe sweetness—emotion or taste—that feels shallow, exaggerated or undeserved, ultimately unreal. The gut reacts toward and against, seeking a vocabulary to contain excess, to name and accuse and banish it: too much sentiment, unmediated by nuance; too much sweet, undisciplined by restraint. The hunger for unmitigated and uncomplicated sensation carries on its tongue an unspoken shame. “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse,” Epicetus once said. The body is a monstrous thing that turns the soul grotesque, and that sentimental craving for a quick fix of feeling, or sudden rush of sweet, feels like the emotional equivalent of that cumbersome luggage—corporeal and base—an embarrassing set of desires that our ethereal, higher selves have to lug around. Melodrama is something to binge on: cupcakes in the closet.

Then I think about this: how I’d like a different drink than what I’m drinking. I am one of the revolutionists, thirsty for orangeade by the side of the road. I want one of those bright plastic mugs they drink from on Bourbon Street, full of frozen daiquiris that taste like they’re trying to trump their namesake fruits. My sister-in-law calls these artificial flavors “Obsequious Watermelon,” “Obsequious Apple,” “Obsequious Banana.” These drinks are working overtime to grant their favors.

Obsequious seems right: attempting to win favor by flattery. Isn’t this the problem of saccharine literature? That it strokes the ego of our sentimental selves? That we’re flattered when something illuminates our capacity to feel? That this satisfaction replaces genuine emotional response?

Perhaps this is nothing more than a pathetic fallacy: the loss of love writ large, demanding the submersion of an entire city.

This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription—insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself—and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. As Wilde said: the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. It’s a kind of Horatio Alger–bootstrap ethos in our aesthetic economy: you need to earn your reactions to art, not simply collect easy sentiment handed out like welfare.

We have ongoing arguments about the expression of sentiment. These arguments are ostensibly aesthetic, but really they are personal, the same old fights that couples who don’t write poetry or fiction have every single day, yelling across molded aspic salads: You say too much about your feelings. You don’t say enough. When you speak, it’s in the wrong language.

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren’t hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation.

Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it.

When we criticize sentimentality, perhaps part of what we fear is the possibility that it allows us to usurp the texts we read, insert ourselves and our emotional needs too aggressively into their narratives, clog their situations and their syntax with our tears. Which brings us back to the danger that we’re mainly crying for ourselves, or at least to feel ourselves cry.