Against Love: A Polemic

Kipnis romps through this book with such enthusiasm, it's a delight to read. She looks in every nook and cranny of relationships and holds forth expansively. What a sharp, clever mind is at work. We're asked to consider many things about relationships, not just marriage and not just heterosexual relationships...why is it such a difficult thing for two people to get along, let alone love, over an extended period of time? She rightly says that the 50% divorce rate doesn't include the people who remain in marriages of misery. Kipnis offers adultery as a way in which people can feel the rush of coming to life, but she doesn't hesitate to describe the difficulties of taking that route and that it can easily be only a temporary escape. Why does our culture almost desperately hold marriage up as a standard, even while many of those promoting it most seem to have the greatest difficulty practicing what they preach? When I finished the book I thought of the Buddhist idea that the source of suffering is desire. I also thought of how our society promotes desire as a universal good that should be followed at all times, particularly if the path leads into a store. Is it just a coincidence that while I am shopping for food at the grocery store I can hear love songs being played over the public address system? We want people to want, the encouragement, the inducement is constant. It drives our economy. With every taboo falling or fallen we are consumed with desire without restraint, arriving at our destiny as perfect consumers. Marriage, institutionalized as the most private place of intimacy, is desperately supported because we'd like to believe there is some preserve where crass consumerism can't intrude, but as Kipnis relates we've taken marketing to heart and present ourselves as appealing products on the mating scene. Is it surprising that the product doesn't hold up over time? Image is everything from your car to your house to your job and if one shops for an appealing persona using one's own, how can the charade be expected to last when the pair become known to each other down to every image-busting detail of toothbrushing and body odor? Our culture promotes levity, with everything light and easy and fun. Design life for yourself and don't take it too seriously! We all are practiced at that. But don't we also desperately long for there to be a place of deep and lasting meaning that lies beyond daily superficiality? Marriage is billed as such, but where is one to begin with little experience of sincerity, constancy, commitment and real joy, when we are constantly blinded by appearances? Left unsaid in this book is what I think love is: the unaccountable desire to do for another in ways large or small, to put that person first for the pure pleasure of seeing that person happy, relieved, empowered as a result. There's joy in this benign power beyond anything one can do for oneself. When the other person feels the same way, it can't get any better, marr

Against Love is an extremely interesting work. As the author states, it is a polemic (confrontational argument), not an essay or balanced account of the subject. It is purposefully designed to push the reader into a confrontatory state regarding the subject of love, especially in the context of marriage/coupling in current U.S. society.I found Kipnis' writing wonderful, witty, intense, and refreshing. She is the first author I have read in a long time that sent me packing off to the dictionary more than once in a book. She is erudite without being a stuffy academic, knowledgable without being pedantic, and humorous without being gross. I see her as having the honesty of a Carol Queen, the political savy and wit of a Molly Ivins or Jim Hightower, the insightful intellect of a Noam Chomsky, and more. This is one of the few books I have read in the last few years that had me laughing out loud in places. She really hits the nail right on the thumb. Regardless of how you feel about the topic or the ideas discussed, her writing alone is worth reading the book.Of course, I may be biased. Her writing style is similar enough to mine that I felt very much at home with this book, and read it quickly. She does write in a style that is complex, with long sentences (and paranthetical asides). She also has a substantial vocabulary. Her use of style is neither narcissistic nor exhibitionistic, however. Her use of language in her presentation of ideas is pointed and precise, and it is difficult to put the book down once one starts reading it. (I found myself reading it in one sitting.) Despite being divided into chapters, it reads more like one long, flowing discussion.As far as the actual material, it is not an exhaustive history of marriage and courtship behavior in U.S. society. It is a series of observations and arguments exploring the weakness of the concepts of love and marriage as they are viewed today by mainstream U.S. culture. Kipnis connects recent biological research, various social theories, and behavior reported by people in therapy to weave her arguments. She does address some historical material in order to provide context for her arguments, but again, it is by no means exhaustive. She does provide enough information, however, sources cited in the text and a bibliography and reference list, to encourage more in-depth exploration.It is meant to be a starting point for further exploration and discussion, and offers no surprise happy endings and no panaceas. This is not a book about how to be polyamorous, develop new relationship styles, swing, or live happily alone. It is an intellectual broadside fired at the status quo in order to get people to open up and think about something which is normally not in their conscious awareness, and to question that which is usually mindlessly accepted.

With divorce rates increasing by 30 percent since 1970, Laura Kipnis considers marital dissatisfaction to be a national epidemic in our country. Tossing one cherry bomb after the next at the institution of marriage, her book is not so much a polemic against love, as a brutally honest argument in favor of unconditional love and the pursuit of happiness outside the "domestic gulags" of marriage. Kipnis compares the love-takes-work ethic of marriage to industrial factory work, and entertains the possibility that "there could be forms of daily life based on something other than isolated households and sexually exclusive couples" (p. 179). She calls singles and adulterers "freedom fighters," who have escaped the barbed-wire fences of the Christian model of marriage so deeply ingrained within America, a nation we mustn't forget that was founded on a Declaration of Independence. Kipnis is an academic. Her book is smart and witty. The eight-page catalogue of things you can't do because you're in a couple, but sacrifices we nevertheless make for the sake of companionship and occasional sex (pp. 84-92), will leave more than a few readers questioning the point of romantic relationships altogether. By rattling a few convictions about married life, AGAINST LOVE succeeds at exactly what it sets out to do.G. Merritt

What a courageous and wonderful book! Kipnis has the dignity to credit Marx and others for first revealing the truth about "marriage" (that it's about maintaining and securing the social order, not fulfilling the human need for bonding and companionship) along with the honesty, wit and keen powers of observation to demolish its central myth, "love." Keepers of the faith shudder, for good reason, because she never fails to provoke nods of recognition with her relentless and often amusing chronicle of the miseries of married life, thereby casting an air of inevitability on adultery, the solution resorted to by many, and longed for and thought about by many more.She offers no solutions, but leaves no doubt that the model of idealized and eternal coupledom -- the soul of "love" -- has nothing to do with human nature, and should be dropped. Good social criticism that skewers deeply held beliefs succeeds only when it rings with truth to the reader. This Kipnis achieves with more than a margin to spare. Psychotherapists, preachers, and talk-show hypocrites beware!

This is the best social criticism you'll read in years. It's worth the price of admission for pages 84-92 alone, where Kipnis hilariously answers the simple question, "What can't you do because you're in a couple?" If you're accidentally having an affair or even just contemplating accidentally having one, this book will make you feel less alone. I loved AGAINST LOVE.