Love songs tend dwell on the extremes of human relationships: Whether it’s the resilient fury of a woman scorned in I Will Survive, the overwrought caterwauling of Lionel Richie and Diana Ross in Endless Love, or the freak atmospheric conditions that sometimes causes it to rain men.

“You’re the greatest thing I ever saw, and I’m the greatest thing ever born,” bellows Shed Seven’s Rick Witter in the chorus of Head and Hands, perfectly encapsulating the bulletproof hubris of a new relationship. Others are less aggrandising, preferring, for reasons known only to themselves, the insipid mewlings of James Blunt – in itself the musical equivalent of a Valentines Day teddy bear, the lace-trimmed, red satin heart stitched to its furry chest, acting as a noticeboard for a synthetically embroidered, simperingly-phrased declaration of affection that deliberately misspells the word ‘love.’

Florence and the Machine’s absolutely god-awful Kiss with a Fist reduces a dysfunctional relationship to a succession of cartoon-inspired acts of domestic violence, like the homicidal antics of The Simpsons’ cat and mouse duo - Itchy and Scratchy - crossed with one of the grimmer films of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh.

Madonna and Prince have both forged lengthy careers from thrusting their crotches in the direction of sexual taboos, with the end results often no more erotic than watching night-vision footage of lions humping in a nature documentary narrated in prim, no-nonsense tones by the late Barbara Woodhouse.

If there is a place where the love song still treads with trepidation then it’s the interminable minutiae of the long-term relationship: The petty over-reactions to small annoyances, whose importance is magnified by constant proximity to the object your affections; The self-sabotage, the manipulation and the point scoring; The righteous anger, so pure and incandescent that it can only be quelled by a furious accusatory letter scrawled across a trio of post-it notes and attached to various items of dirty crockery left lying in the kitchen sink; The need to redress a perceived imbalance of power by forcing a pair of pine cones into the toes of your partner’s work shoes and then feigning surprise and bafflement as to how they got there.

Rare is the songwriter who delves into this uncomfortable territory. When they do, the results can sometimes strike an unsettling chord, like being told something unpleasant about yourself that you didn’t really want to know, but would probably be a better person for acknowledging.

Willie Nelson’s Funny How Time Slips Away presents one-side of conversation between a man and his ex, following their chance meeting. It begins cordially enough with him asking her how she is, and reflecting that it seems like only yesterday that they were together. In the second verse he asks after her new lover. “Heard you told him, that you'd love him till the end of time” he remarks, adding “Now, that's the same thing that you told me, seems like just the other day.” By the end of the final verse any pretence of civility is swept aside by his parting words “Remember when I tell you, in time you’re gonna pay,” and his vaguely threatening insinuation that he’ll be back in town again but he can’t say exactly when that will be.

Tom the Model is Beth Gibbons’ deeply unflattering portrait of a manipulative woman’s last ditch attempt to hold onto her man; the pay-off in the song’s distraught chorus (“You know you don't ever have to worry about me”) supplemented by the unhinged hum of the backing vocals.

However the award for most repellent, passive aggressive song every penned must go to The Script for The Man Who Can’t Be Moved. Here the heartbroken protagonist actually beds down in his sleeping bag on the street corner where he first met his ex, and then, like Iraq war protestor, Brian Haw, resists all attempts to move him on.

“Got some words on cardboard, got your picture in my hand saying, "'If you see this girl can you tell her where I am,'" sings Danny O'Donoghue, his supposedly romantic gesture exposed as a needy act of emotional blackmail from the man who can’t be moved, to the girl who has moved on.

“Maybe I'll get famous as the man who can't be moved, maybe you wont mean to but you'll see me on the news,” he ponders, clearly anticipating that his actions might earn him a low level celebrity status on par with that of an early evictee from the Big Brother.

Love songs like to present us as people whose passions are the equal of the situations in which we find ourselves: In their soft focus glow we are magnificent in romance; able to stand bloodied, but unbowed in the face of rejection, when the stark reality is that the reverse is often true. A traumatic break-up might elicit nothing more than an emotionally-spent slump of the shoulders and the inability to change the channel during 8 out of 10 Cats. Conversely the desire to sweep the object of our desire off his or her feet and shower them with poetry, written in ink made from crushed rose petals, is often downgraded by our own emotional poverty to a perfunctory kiss of the cheek.

No one wants to admit that they invested as much energy into rehearsing comebacks to a stale, two-day old argument as they did in choosing a birthday gift for their partner. And yet these mean-spirited, uncomplimentary songs say more about the fragility of the human condition and our often thwarted attempts to rise above it, than their air-brushed counterparts.