Must Read: Against Love

It's always refreshing to take the time to sit down, read a book and let it shake you to the core.

That's what the book Against Love by Laura Kipnis will do to you. It confronts something very dear to us. Something we've all thought about and perhaps experienced. It confronts our ideas about love, relationships and commitment; it turns them upside down and challenges us to see love as a mere social institution that we've bought into.

Kipnis goes through the teachings of Marx and Freud; connects the privilege of marriage to the federal government; she discusses social economic theory and many other mind-boggling, but perfectly logical reasons why we might want to be...against love.

Here are a few quotes from the book - I hope they give you some idea of the interesting case she makes and why it might be worth your time to read:

"No, we're social creates to a fault and apparently such malleable ones that our very desires manage to keep lockstep with whatever particular social expectations of love prevail at the moment. What else would explain a polity so happily reconciled to social dictates that sex and labor could come to function like one inseparable unit of social machinery? Where's the protest? Where's the outrage?" (p. 24)

"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." (p. 36)

"Wives were a form of property; wifely adultery was a breach of male property rights, and worse, it mucked up the orderly transmission of property via inheritance. It was only with the rise of the bourgeoisie - whose social power was no longer based on landholdings and inherited wealth - that marriages based on love rather than family alliances become the accepted practice. In other words, love matches became socially accepted once they no longer posed an economic threat to the class in power." (p. 60)

"Why should the state license marriages, by the way? Don't ask, just play along because if you do, the state will show its gratitude by conferring numerous special privileges on you: there are reportedly over a thousand places in federal law where marriage confers benefits not allotted to the nonmarried....In exchange for its munificence, the state asks just a teensy courtesy from you in return: fidelity to its particular vision of marriage. This would be the Christian ideal of lifelong monogamy: one wife per husband, one sex partner each, for eternity. (This makes adultery not only an infidelity to your spouse, but also to your country.)" (p. 169)

"The question then, becomes this. If other vows were up for examination, if social contracts could be renegotiated, what other areas of dissatisfaction would be next on the list? What other paralyzed and sedimented institutions would have to start watching their steps?" (p. 198)

As feminists, we are certainly familiar with challenging large institutions such as the "patriarchy." So why not try and challenge the idea of love?

I urge you all to look at how you proceed in life, love and the pursuit of happiness. When it comes to love, are you just following society's expectations? Are you on auto-pilot toward marriage just because it's the "right thing to do"? Or do you pro-actively pursue love that is effortless yet fulfilling, monogamous yet exciting, non-traditional yet honest?