Against Love: A Polemic

by Laura Kipnis

A polemic against love that is “engagingly acerbic ... extremely funny.... A deft indictment of the marital ideal, as well as a celebration of the dissent that constitutes adultery, delivered in pointed daggers of prose” ( The New Yorker).

Who would dream of being against love? No one. Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions.

But is there something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.

Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Feminism, Love, Sociology, Relationships, Essays

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Laura Kipnis is the author of Against Love: A Polemic; How to Become A Scandal; The Female Thing; Bound and Gagged; and the upcoming Men: Notes from an Ongoing Observation (out in November). Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. She's written essays and criticism for Slate, Harper’s, Playboy, New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. A former filmmaker, she teaches filmmaking at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago and New York.

Reviews

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite part of this book is a 9-page laundry list of all one can't do while in a relationship. To give you a sense of it:

"You can't leave the house without saying where you're going. You can't not say what time you'll return. You can't stay out past midnight, or eleven, or ten, or dinnertime, or not come right home after work. You can't go out when the other person feels like staying home. You can't go to parties alone. You can't go out just to go out, because you can't not be considerate of the other person's worries about where you are, or their natural insecurities that you're not where you should be, or about where you could be instead. You can't make plan without consulting the other person, particularly not evenings and weekends, or make decisions about leisure time usage without a consultation...

"You can't do less that 50 percent around the house, even if the other person wants to do 100 or 200 percent more housecleaning than you find necessary or even resonable...You can't not express appreciation when the other person makes the bed, even if you don't care. You can't sleep apart, you can't go to bed at different times, you can't fall asleep on the couch without getting woken up to go to bed...

"You can't can't be less concerned with the other person's vulnerability than with expressing your own opinions. You can't express inappropriate irony about something the other person takes seriously. Or appropriate anger at something the other person takes casually. You can't call a handyman to repair something if they consider themselves to be 'handy.' You can't not be supportive, even when the mate does somethign insupportable. You can't analyze the cinematography in a move that they were emotional about. You can't not participate in their mini-dramas about other people's incompetence, or rudeness, or existence."

And so on and so on.

She ends with: "Thus is love obtained."

Just great.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Against Love seems like it'd be the exact kind of book I'd, well, love. Anyone who's paid attention to my reviews knows I tend to enjoy a book that challenges the widely accepted norms of our culture, and if an author can say things I disagree with while still making me admire the way she says them, I enjoy it even more. But a book like this has to be smart, sharp, eloquent, and entertaining the whole way through, and the less a book delivers on these qualities, the less likely a reader is to be engaged, much less persuaded, by what the author is trying to do. Is it unfair to ask so much of one book? Not, frankly, if an author expects that she can just shoot her mouth off and people will listen. The bar you have to clear as a writer is much higher in that case.

You can tell by this lengthy opening that Against Love didn't clear that bar, at least in my opinion. Sure, the intro (some of which is replicated on the book's cover) is fun, and her initial exploration of all the ways U.S. culture tries to convince us that being married is the only acceptable way to live is fascinating. She follows this with an amusing riff on the oft-repeated idea that "relationships take work," and the alienation of labor that might result.

So, good beginning, but after that things get a little mushy. In some ways Kipnis seems to use "love," "sexual desire," and "marriage" interchangeably; there's no room in her argument for love without marriage, for example, or for not wanting to leave a relationship because you have deeper feelings for the person even after the initial infatuation has cooled off. In fact, for a lot of the book, "love" seems to equal marriage, but staying in a marriage out of genuine love even when the sex aspect has been back-burnered seems to be something only a fool would do. Either you're married, which means your emotions and desires are all deadened, or you're out there fulfilling all of your sexual desires and cutting out as soon as things get less exciting (which seems to be what Kipnis is advocating). Actual love for another human being, ostensibly the topic of the whole piece, doesn't figure into her argument at all. Or at least, it doesn't seem to? The whole thing gets really muddled and tediously repetitive, and neither of those things works for an alleged "polemic," or even just for a moderately satisfying reading experience. Someone should have slashed the middle of the book mercilessly; it really could've used the resulting sharp edges.

The last section addresses powerful men (mostly elected officials) who get caught in affairs and the ways they're viewed in U.S. culture. This is also a topic that could make for some interesting observations, but Kipnis makes the mistake of trying to figure out why these men engage in these affairs, particularly when there's such a high likelihood of being exposed. She essentially concludes that they're striving for "something more" in life. How noble! Uh-huh. Bill Clinton was one of the most powerful men in the world, but he accepted a blow job from Monica Lewinsky because he was looking for "something more." That's definitely what was going on there.

So... yeah. Really interesting idea, not well executed. If this book had been about half its length, it probably would have worked out great; less time for Kipnis to get tangled up in her own arguments, and less room for all the silly, unconvincing stuff. Kipnis definitely has a reputation as a contrarian, and all of her books are on topics that interest me in one way or another, but they may not be worth my time if this is the level of argument she typically serves up.

[nasrin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently read a few excerpts from this book for one of my graduate courses: it was definitely comforting to encounter a different slant on the marriage industrial complex. Ironically, a few days before reading Kipnis I found myself sandwiched in between three women (who were my peers in age) while they were avidly discussing marriage and all its supposed joys. Two of them were married and one was about to be in a few months. Anyway, I often find myself at odds with most people because I am not interested in becoming a married little bunny. Many of my friends are married and I truly do respect their choice--despite the fact that I personally am not a fan of the marriage industrial complex. However, I often wonder why my choice to not participate in marriage is met with such vehement opposition..and, more importantly, I wonder why marriage is seen as immediately sanctified, normalized, and naturalized. It's not.

[Don · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure how to sum this one up. An interesting failure? Maddening yet compelling? I think I remember hearing it angered a lot of people because it challenged their beliefs - which I'm all in favor of. Unfortunately, what aggravated me about this book is that it doesn't do it well. It's filled with instances of faulty logic (if A sometimes leads to B, it's a bit hinky to imply that A always leads to B), leaps of reasoning that border on the ludicrous, and arguments that start with the conclusion and then look for rationales and anecdotes to lead up to them. Surprisingly, I didn't dislike this book because of the beliefs it fervently embraced; instead, I just wished I could read the better-written version of this book.

[Dinah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alright, Laura. Here's the skinny. Your book caused a bit of an uproar when it came out, because your whole angle is anti-everything this country and its romantic populace stand for. You make a convincing argument that lifelong exclusive coupledom is for the birds (swans, specifically), and that we humans have a lousy track record at it. Thing is, the current divorce rate and latest news update on a Republican family values guy make the same point, in far fewer pages.

I guess this book would be a better read for someone who hasn't spent much head-time with queer theory. It was hard to be shocked with your breathless assertions that monogamy doesn't work for everyone, that the definition of marriage and relationships have changed over time, that better systems exist in theory and reality.

And that really was the big problem with this book: the breathlessness. I was continually flabbergasted by the length of sentences, the way paragraphs spanned pages, the sheer number of parentheticals crammed into a single unit. The book is snarky to the point of obnoxiousness -- the sort of thing that I would love to read in blog-length snippets, ripping away at the heteronormative assumption of the day, but for a whole book the tone was beyond tedious.

That being said, some of your points fucked me up real good, Laura. There's a long examination of how we apply metaphors of labor to love, i.e. "working on a relationship." So we come home from work to do much harder work. Should love be a thing that's worked at? Is the stability of coupled life worth it? I might be able to think about these questions more clearly reading Laura Kipnis's ideas, written by somebody else who does not give the impression of authoring on amphetamines.

Can this be blamed on the form? Maybe. Polemics have fallen out of fashion for a reason. I think that reason is, nearly everything we read is polemical these days. Opinions are radicalized to the extreme, although good theorists and reporters do try to make a nod to the other side. There's a value to calling a spade a spade, and there certainly is something radical about taking Love to task. But the problem with a polemic is that it offers no viable alternatives. Which isn't the point! I know! But if you're going to make me feel troubled, I'd like you to also give me a little bit of hope, Laura. There's gotta be something salvageable about this love business.

[G (galen) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basic premise: Monogamy is incompatible with passionate love and historically passionate love rarely had anything to do with matrimony. Our culture's current rhetoric surrounding wedded bliss is unnatural and we see the results of the contradiction in the rate of divorces and infidelities in our marriages.

laura is writing a rant not a research paper but she's pulling her inspiration from philosopher/theorists, politics, religion, pop culture, the industrial revolution, current news headlines, surveys and studies of our sexual/marital behavior, and marriage therapy manuals. She delves into the fight over same-sex marriage rights (a bit dated being written in '03 but still applicable), the ludicrousness of anti-polygamy laws, and the irony that conservative right-wing family first politicians (and Bill Clinton) can't keep their own pants zipped. Etc...

She giggles and snorts and rolls her eyes all the way through it. And shows herself to be quite the conspiracy theorist as well connecting the dots between society pushing this image of marital "happily ever after" and society's need for submissive obedient un-passionate drones to be cogs in capitalism's mass-production assembly line machine. ("...suppressing sexual curiosity leads to general intellectual atrophy, including a loss of any power to rebel..." pg 37) (She also uses terms like "declawed" and "housetrained kitten".)

On the writing style, she displayed a tendency to be redundant and circuitous and while sometimes her wordiness held together brilliantly other times it frayed around the edges.
But in general it was a humorous and quick read that was thought provoking and, at times, uncomfortably revealing.

[Caitlin Constantine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kipnis' book is a funny, smart bit of criticism about one of the major engines of modern American society - romantic love. She uses political philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and social criticism to look at the ways concepts of romantic love interact with political economy, how coupledom replicates the nation-state, sometimes with totalitarian results, how romantic love as we know it is really a modern construct, and the intersection of the Puritan work ethic with relationship self-help pop psychology.

If you are looking for some facile Playboy-style repudiation of monogamy, don't bother reading this. You will just be confused by the big words. However, if you are interested in a serious deconstruction of one of the institutions we take most granted, you should totally check this out.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I was reading this book on the N train, a man sat down next to me and said "I noticed the title of your book. It looks very interesting, but how can anyone be against love?"

Barf.

He then wrote me a note with his name and workplace, and told me to stop by sometime to swap books with him, because he, uh, likes to read too.

I'm so amused that this book, of all books, inspired that particular interaction. Kipnis is quite a provocateur, and she's also very, very funny. I related strongly to many of her criticisms of traditional domestic models and the adultery they inspire. I'll continue to hold onto my shreds of idealism regarding communicative and committed relationships, but her points are well-taken, and highly entertaining to boot.

[Gabrielė Bužinskaitė · Rating 3 out of 5]

Romantic love is rarely questioned as a social norm. Why is it assumed billions of people with different needs, desires, and personalities must all live by the same model of life?

Given the rates of infidelity, divorce, and disappointment, it is clear we have unrealistic expectations of what romantic love relationships deliver, but we nonetheless insist it’s the wrong partner, personal failures, or unfavourable circumstances that are faulty, never the concept of love itself.

Kipnis starts sharply in this polemic (a piece that one-sidedly and aggressively argues either for or against something) by asking uncomfortable questions. Is love merely a desire that is destined to be killed by time? And when it dies, must it then be turned into labour, as we’re told good relationships take work (which supports therapy, counselling, and self-help industries), in the more-often-than-not fruitless attempt to revive it?

The author discusses these topics and more, and it's provocative and thus difficult to put down. However, after initial sharp questions and analysis, the author's voice changes, and the book turns into something resembling a rant more than a critique. She focuses on marriage and its shortcomings, seemingly forgetting all the other ways romantic love can exist.

I would recommend reading one-third of this book to get your mind thinking, then abandoning the rest, for it offers no more value than a rant post on the relationship subreddit.

[Peacegal · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gulag Archipelago has nothing on love, according to Laura Kipnis. With intelligent wit and hilariously dry humor, the author makes the provocative case that our most cherished emotion is nothing but the worst sort of self-imposed prison.

You can’t not make the bed … You can’t drink during the day, even on weekends. … You can’t make jokes about gas.

Jesus, I guess I was unknowingly lucky in my messy-bed having, daytime beer-drinking, fart-joking household.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Against Marriage ould be a much more accurate title for Laura Kipnis's book-length essay, Against Love: A Polemic. Kipnis says in a preface that her arguments are meant to be taken in a contrarian spirit, but I think that arguments made as the devil's advocate must still be coherent arguments--a criterion that not everything here seems to meet. Kipnis is quite willing to admit how fun love is, even if it makes you a little crazy. She's just not willing to buy into cultural pressure to commit to one person forever when she doesn't feel like it.

The primary points that Kipnis highlights are: coupled relationships (specifically official ones: marriage) are closely related to other structures of our social contract; that love has somehow come to serve a societal purpose beyond personal desire. Further, adulterers can be seen as not just betraying their spouses, but actually questioning and rebelling against a whole variety of society's demands.

Maybe. There remain holes in the writing, however. A chapter is devoted to comparing those renegade adulterers with the labor protesters of the past, the rationale being that we now often talk about "working at our relationships." Kipnis makes no attempt, though, to compare the work of going to office or factory with the work of a relationship. It strikes me as more likely that we simply describe anything that we don't feel like doing as work (e.g. doing what your partner feels like instead of gratifying your own impulses), and that work therefore replaced a previous set of metaphors for the self-renunciations of love, which were religious. No attempt is made in the book to make the reader buy into the premise of the discussion.

Strong points are made with only oblique evidence. The following is interesting, but not convincing.

No doubt a citizenry schooled in renouncing desires--and whatever quantities of imagination and independence they come partnered with--would be, in many respects, advantageous: note that the conditions of lovability are remarkably convergent with those of a cowed workforce and a docile electorate. [...:] Perhaps a secular society needed another metaphysical entity to subjugate itself to after the death of God, and love was available for the job. (94)

Despite the spottiness of the arguments, the book is intermittently fun to read because of the unsettling perspicacity of Kipnis's writing. Addressing the question of gay marriage, she writes, "If heterosexuals were bailing out of matrimony in droves, at least there was another group standing by to repopulate the ranks, like a new wave of civic-minded immigrants eager to move in and spruce up abandoned neighborhoods with fresh coats of paint and small business loans: soon it becomes the hip place to be and the middle classes all want to move back in." (149) To me this perfectly sums up the patronizing attitude of those who believe that gay marriage would be not just good for gays, but good for marriage qua institution.

There is an explosion in an answer to the hypothetical question about compromises, "What can't you do because you're in a couple?"

You can't leave the house without saying where you're going. You can't do less then 50 percent around the house, even if the other person wants to do 100 to 200 percent more housecleaning than you find necessary or even reasonable. You can't leave your (pick one) books, tissues, shoes, makeup, mail, underwear, work, sewing stuff, or pornography lying around the house. You can't amass more knickknacks than the other person finds tolerable. You can't turn the airconditioner up as high as you want. You can't watch soap operas without getting made fun of. You can't drink during the day, even on weekends. You can't just walk out of your job or quit in a huff. You can't bring Ding Dongs into the house. You can't call a handy man to repair something if they consider themselves to be "handy." You can't wear plaid... (84 ff.)

By including eight pages of this, a momentarily comic effect is created, but there is a similar undercurrent of deep bitterness through the whole book, which possibly explains the jumps from premise to conclusion with so little discussion in between--perhaps all Kipnis is really trying to do here is show what modern coupledom feels like to her.

Her intent is to provoke, and she succeeds in a surprisingly entertaining way.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kipnis seems to misunderstand her own argument. Despite the book's title, it isn't a polemic against love, at all: it's a screed against hypocrisy. In exasperated prose, Kipnis lists the moral vexations that we moderns have brought upon ourselves by clinging imaginatively to Puritanical sexual mores while enacting rather more libertine ones in our everyday lives. Kipnis wants to argue that monogamy is a concept left over from a different time and that we should just admit that our social values have changed so much that our morality has disconnected from our behavior. Once that's settled, we can stop trying to fix ourselves with self-help books and stop punishing our political leaders for run-of-the-mill sexual transgressions and move into a new world of... well... Kipnis actually has no suggestions about what should replace the supposedly outmoded values. In fact, the argument as I've stated it is considerably clearer than the one she makes in the book, for two reasons: first, because she fails to define love in a meaningful way; and second, because she seems to think that she's arguing against some notion of monogamy that we delude ourselves into thinking is love, though the exact connections between what we think we think and what she thinks we think are never quite made, unless you consider offering anecdotes of violent spousal crimes an argument. Along the way, she makes dubious analogies between vows of public service and marriage vows & the boredom of factory labor and the boredom of long-term monogamy, and she seems to play a little fast and loose with her sources, shoehorning the conclusions of other people's work into her own arguments, even when they don't necessarily fit. If it seems like I'm spending a long time on a negative review, it's because I believe the subject matter here is worthy and deserves much better treatment. I had high hopes for this book after hearing the author interviewed, and I was severely disappointed.

[Ville Verkkapuro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh how I loved this book. This is one of those books that has such a name that you know right away that you are in for a wonderful ride. And this gave everything and more that it promised: a fun yet painfully true depiction of why love is evil. What we call love. We claim to love, but we want control. We claim to love, but we just can't face our fears. We claim to love, but we destroy communities.
I enjoyed especially the parts where Kipnis tells you what you cannot do in relationships. And another thing that struck me: the fact that it's mostly about time. That's what I've been telling you all this time! It's about time! And it's always the artists, beatniks and other no-good dreamers who have an issue with time. Because we can't simply understand or stand that somebody wants to take everything that is beautiful in this life and put it in a box with a clock on top.
Of course, it's not about love as it doesn't really consider what love is. It's about romantic love and mostly about relationships. Love is love, it's wonderful, it's grace and forgiveness and freedom and creativity. And relationships are invisible cages, where we have a million different ways of convincing that it's okay to get mad at people, to demand them to do things they don't want to do, to get mad if you don't get to use one's body for your own benefit. Things like this. Evil things. Relationships are evil.

[Avory Faucette · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected to like this book a little more than I actually did. I picked it up because it was mentioned in another book, and I thought I might agree with the author, as I assumed it was an indictment of traditional monogamy. Which it is, in a way, but not exactly. To be fair, I was warned. Kipnis says in the introduction that this is a polemic, and so the mild whinginess is probably to be expected. Nonetheless, I find the lack of solutions frustrating. She makes some accurate points about what's wrong with traditional marriage, and I like that she started by saying that this applies to all marriage-like relationships, gay and straight, licensed or not, and that she'd be avoiding gender. At the same time, the book doesn't actually apply to relationships that don't basically fit the mold of a conventional marriage. Being a polemic, it's basically a description of problems, but the problems are quite gendered despite repeated reminders that they can apply to men or women, and the relationship described is nothing like the relationships a lot of us have. Adultery is presented as something that can't be avoided but is also not ideal. I found myself shouting out obvious solutions in my head - where is the feminist take on this, the full recognition of how gender roles play into the problematic sex life of the hypothetical marriage? Where is the discussion of polyamory or other alternatives? Polygamy is mentioned in the context of the Mormon church, and implicitly improved, but that particular conception is again patriarchal and can create the same problems. It was an easy read, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Also, a picky note: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn't a Pinter play; it's by Edward Albee (see page 101).

[Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

moments of deep nodding and moments of “well I don’t know about all that!”

compels me though! a fun read. if my wife ever sees that I had a generally positive response to this book: I read it before I met you what a testament to the transformative power of our love dinner on me tonight xoxo

[Jeroen · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of Against Love, in order to prove the changing manner in which we look at monogamy and to debunk the TINA (There Is No Alternative)-like dogma of it, Laura Kipnis quotes William Godwin, who rather categorically states that "[it] is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable portion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness."

Now, it is not that hard to dismiss this as the sour rant of an unhappy husband, one more long-dead white man making a bold claim about society. And yet the way fidelity is implemented and policed in our society is so stringent that it becomes easy to Concur with Godwin's view. To me, at the very least, such a tightly strung-up coupling can only cause absolute breakdown of the self.

In this rather ingeniously named book Kipnis rails above all against the instituted indoctrinal view of love as primarily marital and chaste. To me, and to Kipnis too, this is not necessary love, rather something like companionship, rather just a guarantee that you will not go through life alone, or at the very least that you will be alone together - with another lonely soul.

But, obviously, it depends on the relationship. I've always loved Aaron Weiss saying to and about his wife: "I'm not going to ever take away your loneliness, and I'm not going to let you take away mine." In a song from mewithoutYou's record from last year, "2,459 miles", he reasserts this notion, singing softly to his wife -almost as if in lullaby- that "You can leave me anytime, you can leave me anytime." To him, marriage is protecting each other's solitudes. This sounds much more healthy to me.

Of course, though, when the marriage is not working out well, you can always work on it. Kipnis is at her best when she picks at the language of contemporary love. "When did the rhetoric of the factory become the default language of love?" she asks, before suggesting rereading Marx's Kapital as marriage manual. In the same vein, she coolly lists the language of matrimonial (dis)passion: mechanical sex, frigid wives, cold husbands.

If first you work on your relationship together, and then when that does not work, you ask for professional advice, and "will soon discover that the disease doubles as the prescription at this clinic: you're just going to have to 'work harder on yourself'". Work is always the cure. (Thank you, Weber.)

Channeling Marx, Kipnis thinks of marriage and long-term commitment as an analgesic that keeps capitalism functional, that keeps modern society in check. "Clearly, routing desire into consumption would be necessary to sustain a consumer society-a citizenry who fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding to a standstill." She writes of adultery as an act of rebellion against this system, against capitalism even. This reminded me of the essay 24/7 by Jonathan Crary in which he thinks of sleep in the same manner, as an unproductive spoke in the wheel of the capitalists.

The point in the end is that all of this is not against love at all. It is for love, a desperate attempt at retrieving what has been lost. Some schools of philosophy state that the act of growing up is going from dreaming the-world-to-be to accepting the-world-as-is. The crazy thing about growing up is that we do it without any conscious effort, and in the end we end up like David Byrne in "Once in a Lifetime", finding ourselves "in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and we may ask ourselves, 'well, how did I get here?'".

My personal view is that what we have to fight at all costs is this definition of growing up. Love should not be work; it should be an incomplete sculpture that we at all costs resist completing.

To paraphrase Breton, love will be convulsive or it will not be at all.

And love, in all the best cases, is, as Kipnis astutely puts it, forgetting what the question is.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

It would be so easy to simply disregard this book and the author. Clearly identifying with adulterers (only using "we" when discussing the cheaters POV) and therefore, in my opinion, personalizing the topic, Ms. Kipnis spends the entire book validating her claim that monogamy/love is simply unnatural. Now, don't get me wrong, while her book (and by "book" I mean "dissertation") does have a lot of valid points regarding monogamy and the rules and stipulations that come with it, she continuously backs up her denouncement with notations from various philosophers, theorists, scientist, etc. Kind of makes you take it more seriously, doesn't it? Almost, right up until you realize EVERY one of those esteemed names dropped...all noted adulterers. So, again, not an objective viewpoint in the entirety of the book.

Now on to the content: Do I think Love is simply another way for society to control the masses and the only reason it feels special and important is because the media makes it so? No. Did Ms. Kipnis back up her claim? No, in fact she came off as nothing more than a bored, unhappy woman looking for a gimmick for her thesis and decided conspiracy theorist sounded like fun. Do I think monogamy is unnatural, similar to being a prisoner at Dachau, and that I'm really meant to be humping every male that peacock's my way? No, and I have to tell you, I don't think Ms. Kipnis believes that either. In fact, as much as she identifies with and empathizes with the cheater lifestyle - it was only in the description and the outcome of this lifestyle that you are really able to see the writer through the words - she comes off like an addict: loving the feeling in the moment, but hating herself for it later.

[Sammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five stars is probably too much for this; in truth it's at three and a half stars. But for me, this book had an impact that can't be denied: I discovered this book whilst taking a Marxist politics course in my first year of uni. I was distinctly unimpressed by the Marxist politics, but this book managed to perfectly state my uneasy feelings about the complacency so many of my friends and colleagues had toward the idea of love and marriage as an unshakable moral code.

Kipnis frankly states that she is not, really, against *love* (the title is muckraking more than anything else). Really, she's against the perception that marriage should be a lifelong bond that can never be broken; that affairs or feelings of infidelity are somehow immoral, unnatural and should be grounds for dismissing someone from public office; and other such ludicrous strains of "moral fibre" which permeate our society.

A couple of the chapters, which attempt to mix in Kipnis' own Marxist beliefs, go a bit too far. Not because of the Marxism, but because they dilute her central argument and - to be honest - feel like chapters from another book altogether. However, I heartily recommend this book even if you'll end up disagreeing with a lot of it! No one says you have to change your opinion because you read "Against Love"; but who wants to go through life not even having heard the other side of the debate?

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reasons why this book is disappointing:
1. Kipnis’ arch, ironic tone begins to wear thin about halfway through the first chapter. It might work for an article, but it’s far too precious to be tolerable for an entire book.
2. Kipnis isn’t really against love—she’s just against marriage. She’s actually very much in favor of the disruptive force of adulterous love.
3. The book is essentially the same argument presented over and over (marriage is boring and its primary purposes have more to do with maintaining the state and capitalism than anything about love).
4. After the reader has trudged through 200 pages with her, Kipnis does a cute little about-face “maybe I’m just kidding” move in the final five pages in which she gives a nod to her own ambivalence and raises the possibility that the previous 195 pages have been an extended flirtation.

Reasons why I read it anyway:
1. Awesome covert art (photo by Chas Ray Krider).
2. Amazing reference list. I’m already planning to check out psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ books.
3. We need a book about this topic, and unfortunately this is the only one out there.

Laura Kipnis books are now running 0-2 with me, and I’m going to go for 0-3 with Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. As usual, I remain hopeful. Meet back here for my report.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book says it all, everything I ever felt about the infamous institutions of love and marriage... most of which I could hardly articulate before this book because it is all such a hard sell in our society.

Pages 84-92 are worth the price of admission: "What can't you do because you're in a couple?" The polemic voice is the only one that could tackle such a complicated concept, and I doubt any one could do it better than Kipnis has.

[Steph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of food for thought. It was especially interesting to read shortly after a breakup.

The fundamental bargain of sustained coupledom: either individual's autonomy or freedom of movement is of secondary importance compared to the other person's security and peace of mind.

&

Every sufferer seeks a guilty agent.

[Talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smart and snarky. Kipnis pokes holes in our idealization of conventional coupling and the prevalent maxim that "relationships take work."

[Ciara · Rating 5 out of 5]

i read this book right after i read all about love by bell hooks. i wonder if it would have been possible for me to read two more contrasting books. billed as a pelimic, this book takes a very uncompromising stand against love, as it exists in its current incarnation as the force that compels people to enter into traditional heterosexual monogamous marriage units. kipnis draws a lot of parallels between love & capitalism in order to illustrate the evils of both. it's kind of a little bit an argument for adultery, maybe, which isn't something that really excites me too much, maybe because i draw a sharp distinction between romantic love & sexual attraction. they're not the same thing people! no matter what your mama may have wanted you to believe! i mean, i have my own theories about love & relationships & what makes relationships work, & ultimately, i think most relationships don't work, specifically because people don't allow enough room for complexity, change, growth, & a little healthy disappointment every now & again. but this isn't a forum for my beliefs on the issue. suffice to say that this book is a good jumping-off point for people who think something might be rotten with the traditional institution of love, but bear in mind that "polemic" means she is TRYING to get a rise out of you, okay?

[Bowie Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really appreciate the connections Kipnis makes between industrialization and capitalism and the ways in which we experience and form expectations of romantic love. This is most definitely a book I could read again; it is useful as a starting point to think about the origin and evolution of social norms in relation to the choices we make concerning romantic love. My only criticism is that the last section lagged a little, reiterating the same point about the hypocrisy of politicians who promote "family values" while having a history of affairs and crucifying those who have been caught publicly before they themselves were outed for the same behaviors. I would have liked to read a little more about how we project our personal romantic and sexual struggles onto the lives of those in the public eye, which is why scandals are so titillating to us, but Kipnis does a thorough enough job that it left me wanting to reading a whole book about the subject. Lastly, her comments on marriage equality are prescient, this book having been published in 2003 and marriage equality finally becoming a national reality just last month, 12 years later, in 2015.

[Kirsti · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We are about to enter the hidden linguistic universe of companionate couples, which as we will shortly see, rests entirely on one generative phrase: 'Would you please stop doing that.'"

Mmmmmm . . . as dark and bitter as a 70 percent cacao bar. I wouldn't want to consume a steady diet of this, but I enjoyed Kipnis's point of view. After all, if society insists so overwhelmingly that love is great and good and the whole point of living, then somebody needs to play devil's advocate. If you have ever rolled your eyes at a Hallmark Hall of Fame character/advice maven/Oprah guest who intones, "A healthy relationship takes work," then this may be just the book for you.

[sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who hates love? Hide your nuclear family unit and your carefully guarded assumptions. This hilarious flirtation of a book deconstructs all those oooey-gooey feelings through the lenses of adultery and Marxism. If relationships are hard work, then this is the Situationist brick through the window -- ne travaillez jamais.

[Grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted this to be a critique of monogamy and/or the romantic ideal, but it just seemed to go on and on about how adulterers are acting in defiance of "love" and I thought it was unconvincing and really boring.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Are you married? Read this.

Are you coupled? Read this.

Are you an adulterer? Read this.

Do you reject the idea of marriage out of hand? Read this.

Are you single and think couples are happier? Read this.

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly a life changing book.

[Kat Stromquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully incendiary. A great read.