“Love is a Bourgeois Construct” was the third single released from the Pet Shop Boys' 2013 album Electric. The electro-pop song features a droll narrative about a bourgeois man taking stock of his life after a breakup. Its melody is based on the instrumental “Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds” composed by Michael Nyman (which was initially based on a section of Henry Purcell’s opera King Arthur) for the soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract in 1982 .

Neil Tenant was inspired to write the song after reading David Lodge’s satirical novel Nice Work, specifically this interaction between the protagonist, Vic Wilcox, and an uptight academic:

“I love you,” he says…. “I’ve been in love with you for weeks.”
“There’s no such thing,” she says. “It’s a rhetorical device. It’s a bourgeois fallacy.”
“Haven’t you ever been in love, then?”
“When I was younger,” she says, “I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.”