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Against Love Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis Pantheon, 2003 201 pp. $24

I first caught sight of the book at City Lights in San Francisco, the legendary shop with an extensive stock of apocalyptic literature rivaling the most millenarian of Christian bookstores. Of course, the apocalypses under consideration there are not religious in nature. They address the more immediate threats of global capitalism, Bush's presidency, genetically modified food, environmental holocausts, and various other things that the French are always getting worked up about. In Laura Kipnis' case, the specter is love.

Actually, not love. Love itself gets no airtime in the book entitled Against Love: A Polemic. Infatuation appears, and it is good. So is thrilling sex (boring sex is bad). Marriage is somewhat beside the point as the legal sanction of the greater problem—domestic coupledom. Monogamy plus permanence plus common living quarters equals very bad news indeed.

"Love" as shorthand for all such nastiness, rails Kipnis, is the one unblasphemed idol of this American life, hence the need for a polemic. It's big business: the wedding industry, romantic comedies on large and small screens alike, couples therapy. It is also work. Good relationships take work, hard work, a lifetime of work. They also produce hard workers in other arenas of life: late hours at the office might mean more funds for the family, or they might mean avoidance of the same old spouse when too many anniversaries have passed. Either way, "love" is good for the economy—which, Kipnis suspects, is at the back of our cultural training in coupledom. After all, marriage has always been about the equitable exchange of property—durable goods and women, for the most part. Really, nothing much has changed. And since we all work in order to take vacations, why should monogamy (with a biannual holiday into adultery) be any different?

It's a small step here from economics to politics: love affairs are as revolutionary as the Boston Tea Party. "[I]f adultery is a de facto referendum on the sustainability of monogamy," Kipnis remarks, "this also makes it the nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom." Adulterers are the new social rebels and heroes, Robin Hoods who steal sex from its stultifying confines in marriage (or parallel relationships) and toss it out to the deserving poor, i.e., the uncoupled in today's couple-conscious world. It so happens that they are fairly confused and inconsistent rebels—after all, they are escaping one set of love's demands only to enslave themselves to another. But there are an awful lot of them out there, according to everything from official statistics to personal anecdotes. Numbers demand attention. It turns out that life is pretty much like The Seven Year Itch, just without the happy ending (if that's what you call happy).

So really it's not love, or falling in love, or passion, or anything of the sort that's the problem. The only problem is the expectation that it will last. If by some chance it doesn't, we are trained to expect that it will be replaced by something more mature and less exciting, like stability. Why settle for less? Kipnis exempts those who have "good relationships," but only defined in the following terms: "having—and wanting to have—sex with your spouse or spouse-equivalent on something more than a quarterly basis"; "inhabiting an emotional realm in which monogamy isn't giving something up (your 'freedom,' in the vernacular) because such cost-benefit calculations just don't compute"; not enforcing faithfulness through "routine interrogations," "surveillance," and "impromptu search and seizure"; in short, "a state you don't have to work at maintaining." Clearly, such a state of non-affairs is assumed to be very rare.

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