Against Love: A Polemic (Vintage) by Kipnis Laura

Author:Kipnis, Laura [Kipnis, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307510747
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

THE ART OF LOVE

adulterate (v). 1) To debase by adding inferior materials or elements; make impure by admixture; use cheaper, inferior, or less desirable goods in the production or marketing of (any professedly genuine article).

—Random House Unabridged Dictionary

of the English Language

So are you the type who hadn’t realized how unhappy you’d been until you found yourself in the midst of a serious life-shattering affair, diving headlong into this new person’s arms to escape the rising tide of emotional deadness at home and in some ridiculously short space of time risking things you never thought you’d risk, without a clue how you’ve gotten yourself into this whole thing or what disasters might be waiting around the next corner (or the next credit card bill)? If not, please use your imagination: imagine that every moronic love song is drilling a pathway directly to your deepest self, imagine being hurtled up and down the entire gamut of emotions from one hour to the next, consuming Tums like Raisinets, but what if it’s a million times more compelling than anything else in your life? Even if home life wasn’t totally terrible, even if there were (and are) good times plus all the comforts of familiarity and history and even affection—when not squeezed out by a festering accretion of disappointments and injuries or that low-hanging cloud of overfamiliarity which means knowing in advance the shape of every argument before it even happens, and everything you once liked best about yourself getting buried under the avalanche of routine. Let’s say there’s even sex—reliably satisfying, gets-the-job-done sex (and what’s wrong with that?)—but how can that compare to the feeling of being reinvented? Of being desired? Of feeling fascinating?

Or maybe you’re the type who dived headlong into this love affair—possibly not for the first time?—as a rickety lifeboat from an entirely familiar unhappiness that you can’t bring yourself to do anything about, and whose bittersweet romance with your own melancholia or extended penance for imagined sins (early religious training never stops rearing its head for some) will be your new lover’s real competition, not that mate waiting at home. But even having made your bed you’d still prefer a little company in it now and then, plus the occasional rush of possibility all the while knowing that eventually the sackcloth will come out and there you’ll be, as penitent as the day is long, slinking back to the familiar emotional deep freeze that you can’t (or won’t) forsake.

Or maybe you weren’t unhappy at all, and things were just fine at home, and you were just unlucky enough to fall in love.

Whatever your type, however it started, the point is that you didn’t plan to feel this way, it just happened—well maybe you didn’t plan not to either, or didn’t have the foresight and “maturity” to put the brakes on before it was too late; and if you started spilling the most intimate details about your relationship problems after a couple of drinks, and lately seem to be

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