Considering the other responses on the blog, it probably won’t come as a surprise that I found Kipnis’s book somewhat frustrating. On the one hand, I am deeply sympathetic to her premise, her skepticism of marriage and the companionate couple form. And at many moments (like Alex) I laughed out loud in appreciation and recognition. But at other moments (like Alexis) I wanted to toss the book across the room, for reasons I’ll try to explain below.
You can be impulsive . . .
What perhaps frustrated me most was the shortage of alternatives. At the end of the book, Kipnis extols the possibilities of love, “a zone to experiment with wishes and possibilities and even utopian fantasies about gratification and plenitude” (199).
But rather than elaborate on those “utopian fantasies,” she quickly returns to the theme that runs throughout the book, that “love can be harnessed to social utility . . . an efficient way of organizing acquiescence” (199). I kept wanting more: OK, enough about marriage and adultery, what about other forms of love and intimacy?
Indeed, Kipnis seems unable to think beyond the “system” of monogamy and its opposite. While I wouldn’t describe her as a structuralist—she at least acknowledges possibilities for utopia—her inability or unwillingness to articulate those possibilities does make me wonder whether her underlying theoretical influences somehow constrain her vision of alternatives. While she acknowledges Freud and Foucault and de Certeau as inspirations, her argument also seems influenced by Lacan and Althusser, theorists for whom there is no outside to the system. Despite her insistence on “intellectual promiscuity” (49) and “intellectual flirtation” (200), her actual argument did not seem as “flirtatious” as I would have hoped.
This leads me to a larger question of whether the totalizing tendencies of structuralist accounts of power and subjectivity share common ground with the tendency of polemics to “overstate the case,” as Kipnis describes (4). Just a thought . . .
You can stay out past midnight . . .
Kipnis’s actual stance toward adultery seems ambiguous and ambivalent. In the beginning of the book, she suggests that it is the “nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom” (28). Later, she clarifies that this form of resistance is perhaps not consciously motivated; it is “more of a critical practice than a critical theory,” a “spontaneous” form of “acting out” against the system (28, 139). But even as she claims that adultery offers utopian “visions of change” (165), she also suggests that adultery actually serves as a “release valve” for the pressures of the companionate partnership, indicating that it is an integral part of the system of monogamous love (121-122).
Perhaps, depending on the circumstances, adultery can be any of the above. But considering her tone (which bordered on sneering contempt in the “Art of Love” chapter), I wondered whether even she believed her claims about the radical potential of adultery.
Your best friend can call after ten . . .
Friendship is one of the alternatives I wished Kipnis had explored more.
It is not an inherently radical form of relation; like adultery, friendship can serve as a “pressure release valve” for the companionate couple. For example, friends often perform a kind of emotional labor to initiate and sustain the companionate couple—setting up friends on dates, listening to tales of relationship woes, etc. Many friends don’t seem to mind playing a subordinate role, especially if they too are engaged in their own companionate-couple dramas.
But I’d also like to consider friendship as an alternative to the companionate couple. Jen A. and I have talked a number of times about our shared frustration that close friends are frequently regarded (by society, family members, even the friends themselves) as a lesser priority than romantic partners, even though many friendships long outlast romantic/sexual liaisons. The perennial question to singles, “Have you met anyone special?” implies that the people already in our lives aren’t special. In my experience, I’ve found this relative ranking of relationships doesn’t do justice to the complexity and intimacy of “friendly” love.
~Jennifer B.
