In ‘The Hitchhiking Game’, the first of the short stories that make up Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves, a travelling couple on impulse adopt, but then become entangled in, the roles of female hitchhiker and the driver who picks her up. Their relationship undergoes a dramatic change as their sense of what they and their partner ‘really’ are becomes a function of their new roles, and they are led to question whether their previous identities, their previous ‘selves’, were no less founded upon a set of roles. Pushed to the extreme as a way of exploring the essence of an individual, this approach can only reveal that one's individuality consists essentially in role-playing: Kundera's story ends with its heroine repeatedly sobbing in psychological torment ‘I am me’. To romantic notions of the individual, which see in expressions of love the ultimate definition of the self, the phrase ‘I love you’ represents a climactic moment of truth, and so its use is hedged around with hesitations, expectations, hopes, dreams and anxieties. The moment of using the phrase can be one of exhilaration, but it can also, particularly in retrospect, seem a disappointment. One reaction, particularly for those who have internalized the ideology of romantic love, is that this cannot have been the moment of truth after all, and to resume, perhaps repeatedly, the search for an object of love that will fulfil all needs and desires and bring the longed-for sense of wholeness.