love is, as we know, a mysterious and controlling force. Saying no to love isn't simply heresy it is tragedy the failure to achieve what is most essentially human. So deeply internalized is our obedience to this most capricious despot that artists create passionate odes to its cruelty, and audiences seem never to tire of the most deeply unoriginal mass spectacles devoted to rehearsing the litany of its torments, fixating their very beings on the narrowest glimmer of its fleeting satisfactions. Yet despite near total compliance, a buzz of social nervousness attends the subject. If a society's lexicon of romantic pathologies reveals its particular anxieties, high on our own list would be diagnoses like ''inability to settle down'' or ''immaturity,'' leveled at those who stray from the norms of domestic coupledom either by refusing entry in the first place or, once installed, pursuing various escape routes: excess independence, ambivalence, ''straying,'' divorce. For the modern lover, ''maturity'' isn't a depressing signal of impending decrepitude but a sterling achievement, the sine qua non of a lover's qualifications to love and be loved.

This injunction to achieve maturity synonymous in contemporary usage with 30 year mortgages, spreading waistlines and monogamy obviously finds its raison d' tre in modern love's central anxiety, that structuring social contradiction the size of the san andreas fault: namely, the expectation that romance and sexual attraction can last a lifetime of coupled togetherness despite much hard evidence to the contrary. Ever optimistic, heady with love's utopianism, most of us eventually pledge ourselves to unions that will, if successful, far outlast the desire that impelled them into being. The prevailing cultural wisdom is that even if sexual desire tends to be a short lived phenomenon, ''mature love'' will kick in to save the day when desire flags. The issue that remains unaddressed is whether cutting off other possibilities of romance and sexual attraction for the more muted pleasures of mature love isn't similar to voluntarily amputating a healthy limb: a lot of anesthesia is required and the phantom pain never entirely abates. But if it behooves a society to convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure or wanting to start over is shameful or simply wanting more satisfaction than what you have is an illicit thing, clearly grisly acts of self mutilation will be required. For the greeks, inventors of democracy and a people not amenable to being pushed around by despots, love was a disordering and thus preferably brief experience.

Passion meant suffering: the happy ending didn't yet exist in the cultural imagination. As far as togetherness as an eternal ideal, the 12th century advice manual ''de amore et amor is remedio'' ''on love and the remedies of love'' warned that too many opportunities to see or chat with the beloved would certainly decrease love. The innovation of happy love didn't even enter the vocabulary of romance until the 17th century. Before the 18th century when the family was primarily an economic unit of production rather than a hothouse of oedipal tensions marriages were business arrangements between families participants had little to say on the matter. Some historians consider romantic love a learned behavior that really only took off in the late 18th century along with the new fashion for reading novels, though even then affection between a husband and wife was considered to be in questionable taste. Some tell the story of love as an eternal and unchanging essence others, as a progress narrative over stifling social conventions.

But has modern love really set us free? fond as we are of projecting our own emotional quandaries back through history, construing vivid costume dramas featuring medieval peasants or biblical courtesans sharing their feelings with the post freudian savvy of lifelong analysands, our amatory predecessors clearly didn't share all our particular aspirations about their romantic lives. Since the cultural expectation is that a state of coupled permanence is achievable, uncoupling is experienced as crisis and inadequacy even though such failures are more the norm than the exception. As love has increasingly become the center of all emotional expression in the popular imagination, anxiety about obtaining it in sufficient quantities and for sufficient duration suffuses the population.

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Everyone knows that as the demands and expectations on couples escalated, so did divorce rates. And given the current divorce statistics roughly 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce , all indications are that whomever you love today your beacon of hope, the center of all your optimism has a good chance of becoming your worst nightmare tomorrow. Of course, that 50 percent are those who actually leave their unhappy marriages and not a particularly good indication of the happiness level or nightmare potential of those who remain.

Lawrence stone, a historian of marriage, suggests rather jocularly, you can't help thinking that today's rising divorce rates are just a modern technique for achieving what was once taken care of far more efficiently by early mortality. Everlasting love? against love published by pantheon books review by w. Greer we all want to be in love, to be loved, to be special to someone else and feel that urge of desire and passion that overrides rational thought and consumes us whole. Riding the wave of lust and love, unburdening our soul to another, and sharing the innermost parts of our being leads to a coupling of selves and often a merging of lives in the legal contract of marriage.

After years together, the passion has waned, the sex is infrequent, boring, or nonexistent, and the marriage just moves forward under its own momentum with one or both partners longing for either what they once had or something new. She warns us right at the beginning that this a polemic, and polemics don't tell 'both sides of the story.' they overstate the case. They toss out provocations and occasionally mockery, usually because they're arguing against something so unquestionable and deeply entrenched it's the only way to make even a dent in the usual story. After all, who could be against love? laura kipnis' arguments are more against marriage, or perhaps against fidelity, then they are against love. A 'happy' state of monogamy would be defined as a state you don't have to work at maintaining. If a marriage is so labor intensive, then by definition isn't it an institution full of defects? she pokes fun at the aids that help in the labors of love: self help books, therapy, and antidepressants. They are all used to force people to accept a state of condition that they rationally find lacking.

Kipnis equates the work in a marriage with the work involved in a post industrial society, where the rules and societal structures are in place to keep the citizenry productive and the capitalist economy running at full bore. Quoting marx, freud, and other philosophers, she suggests that marriage has become an institution to control the masses, to keep them working both on the job and off. Parts of the first chapter of the book make your eyes glaze over with the academic arguments and philosophical references.

Adulterers, in this scenario, are the rebels, those asserting their freedom and independence outside the system. Kipnis doesn't glorify them, but instead treats them as inevitable byproducts of an untenable institution of lifelong monogamy. The prevailing cultural wisdom is that even if sexual desire tends to be a short lived phenomenon, nevertheless, that wonderful elixir mature love will kick in just in time to save the day, once desire flags. The question remaining unaddressed is whether cutting off other possibilities of romance and sexual attraction while there's still some dim chance of attaining them in favor of the more muted pleasures of mature love isn't similar to voluntarily amputating a healthy limb: a lot of anesthesia is required and the phantom pain never entirely abates. But if it behooves a society to convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure, starting over is shameful, or wanting more satisfaction than you have is illegitimate, clearly grisly acts of self mutilation will be required. If 50% of marriages end in divorce and if you assume that many, if not most, of the remaining 50% are not happy, then clearly marriage as a lifetime bond between two people is in crisis.

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What is it about marriage that leads to failure? she provides a list that covers several pages of things you can't do if you're part of a couple. Some of these can't items spring from common courtesy in a relationship, you can't go out without the other knowing where you're going and when you'll be back and avoiding things that irritate your mate. Others stem from one partner controlling the behavior of another you can't have insomnia without being grilled about what's really bothering you or losing your personal identity within the confines of the couple you can't have secrets about money or anything else .