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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
In "Against Love," Laura Kipnis considers why the institution of marriage compels us to stray -- for good reason.
Aug 13, 2003 | In the old days, when it was time to get married, your dad would just go over to the next village with a nice-looking cow and a string of puka beads and parade them in front of the family of a nice boy. If the settlement was acceptable to them, you'd become a blushing bride -- no muss, no fuss. You might not like your husband -- you might be lucky if you could even stand the sight of his face -- but at the very least, you knew where you stood. You'd entered a contract. You'd have the babies, cook the food and keep the home nice, and in return, with luck, you'd be well taken care of and possibly not even get beaten. The world fell into place accordingly.
But somewhere along the way, feelings entered the picture. And feelings, as Laura Kipnis will tell you in "Against Love: A Polemic" always muck things up. Because of feelings, people are drawn into those cozily familiar formations known as couples. But also because of feelings -- and because, as Kipnis reminds us, Freud noted that there's a very thin line between disgust and desire -- even the loveliest comforts of coupledom can become stifling, leading first to bad stuff (restlessness, vague feelings of wanting something more) and then, possibly, to really bad stuff: In the worst-case scenarios, formerly contented domestic partners become sex-mad Hester Prynnes, scarlet-lettering all over the place. If they're lucky, they can clean it all up after the fact with a little self-knowledge via marital counseling (all the better, in some cases, to start the cycle all over again); if they're unlucky, they end up in divorce court.
Welcome to the miserable world of modern marriage.
So why is Kipnis' book, which addresses this mess in unsparing detail, such a delight -- in the broadest sense of the word, that is? Reading "Against Love," I felt invigorated half the time and plunged into the deepest, most morose pit of self-pitying despair the rest of it -- in other words, I felt as if I were in love. That seems to have been Kipnis' aim. Her book isn't called a polemic for nothing, which means, as she explains in the introduction, it's designed to turn us upside-down: "Polemics exist to poke holes in cultural pieties and turn received wisdom on its head, even about sacrosanct subjects like love. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won't injure you (well, not severely); it's just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions."
Let's forget that Kipnis even needs to explain what a polemic is. My guess is that she wanted to stem the tide of letters from serious-minded cuddlebugs everywhere, taking pen to paper to assert angrily, "We happen to like being married!" And also to counteract the measured dullness of certain types of book reviewers who feel it's their civic duty to point out all the positive aspects of marriage that Kipnis has failed to deal with -- probably because she's smart enough to know that they're boring as hell to read about.
Instead, Kipnis goes right for the juice: The break for some kind of freedom, that desperate dash for relief from the erotic drudgery of married life -- adultery. "Against Love" could be considered a "defense" of adultery, but it's more accurate to call it an examination of the effects, both positive and negative, that fooling around can have on the fabric of our society. Because as incendiary as the title of Kipnis' book is -- and she hints broadly that it's a title with more than one meaning -- Kipnis doesn't seem to be particularly against love at all. What she's really against are our collective grand expectations of what it means to be part of a couple, expectations that don't take into account the fact that we're all human beings and thus liable to change, in highly unpredictable ways, at any moment. Our idea of marriage doesn't allow for fluidity and openness, and that may not be completely our fault. Because, in Kipnis' view, there are strong societal forces at work that depend on our swallowing, hook, line and sinker, the notion of marriage as a romantic institution. (By "marriage," Kipnis means any long-term romantic partnership, gay, lesbian or straight.) Submerged in the marital jelly of docility and numbness, we're much more productive and easier to manage. We work hard all the livelong day, and then come home, where we work hard at being married, because we all know that "Marriage is hard work." And then, before we know it, all our hard work has killed our libidos, leaving them limp and lifeless and hanging like damp, dejected rags on the clothesline of life.
Cheering, isn't it? And yet there's something bracing about the way Kipnis states the obvious without feeling the need to temper her "cons" with any of those pesky "pros." Who ever comes out and says this stuff? Because face it: Most of us who have spent any length of time in a good relationship (even one that's eventually gone bad) already know what the benefits are. What's harder is admitting that there are elements of long-term partnership that just plain suck. It's not such a stretch to believe that society at large as well as our government have a vested interest in keeping us anesthetized (but always working hard!) in the marital cocoon.
In one of her first audacious acts, Kipnis applies Marxist theory to the marriage contract. "Marx's question remains our own to this day: just how long should we have to work before we get to quit and goof around, and still get a living wage?" If marriage is just another kind of work, where does pleasure come in? Kipnis asks. But then, pleasure and leisure time are dangerous. "'Free time and you free people,' as the old labor slogan used to go," Kipnis writes. "Of course, free people might pose social dangers. Who knows what mischief they'd get up? What other demands would come next?"
