I picked this book up because of a Wall Street Journal review that made me skeptical about its premise but intrigued about its argument. Nehring's thesis is that we smart and savvy 21st-century citizens have overrated compatibility and stability in seeking relationships, turning love into "an organized adult activity with safety rails on the left and right, rubber ceilings, no-skid floors and a clear, clean destination." Instead, she advocates a little turmoil in love, drawing examples from both fictional characters ("Antony and Cleopatra" as Shakespeare's only play about adult love) and creative women in the past 200 years (Emily Dickinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frida Kahlo).
Can I say that this book was successful if it failed to convince me of its point? I suppose from the author's perspective I can't, but even though I disagreed with most of it, it gave me a lot to think about and I enjoyed reading it much more than I expected to from the introduction. In fact, I'm sort of still thinking about it. This book made the term "intellectual page-turner" seem like not such an oxymoron and I love that. So if you get cramped-up and eye-rolly over the introduction, keep reading, it gets much better.
The Journal review focused on how feminism had negatively contributed to this conception of love, which is slightly misleading because Nehring definitely doesn't blame feminism and doesn't spend all that much time addressing it directly. (Sometimes I forget the Journal's ideological bent -- and then I am reminded.) Instead, she considers it more of a cultural shift, into which rising social equality for women may have contributed but isn't a cause. She suggests otherwise equal relationships have room for the perceived imbalance that heightens romantic love, quoting author Siri Hustvedt on how she feels differently about her husband (also a writer) when watching him address a large crowd than when he's doing chores around the house. This imbalance can come from awe, from separation or distance, from engagement on planes other than the purely emotional -- a variety of sources, most of which get their own chapter.
Nehring uses female writers and artists to show how romantic instability enriched their lives, and while I disagree that those details have been neglected in other biographies, as she claims, these are not passive lovers. And to that point, her takedown of HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU, mocking its glorification of control through not doing anything, may be one of my favorite parts of the book.
It's not surprising at all that a book that draws on literature and literary figures for its examples would be so captivating to me, but what I also hadn't expected from other reviews and coverage was its scholarly bent. When I mentioned on Twitter that I was starting this book, one of my tweeps said the book's takeaway was that the author must be very difficult to date. I wouldn't know because at no point does Nehring use her own experience to justify her theory. In fact, some reviewers have decided to parse her acknowledgments section to make conclusions about her love life. Is it sexist of me, to assume that she would use her own life as proof in this post-EAT, PRAY, LOVE world? I think it was a sexist expectation, and I regret that, but it's also a shrewd editorial choice because it would allow the book to be more easily written off by its detractors as... well, another Gilbert remix.
And this isn't a self-help book, either; nowhere does the author say "Here is how you add more drama to your love life." (No one deserves to end up like Heloise and Abelard, am I right, non-cloistered ladies and non-castrated gentlemen?) She instead suggests that some of the factors considered needing to be ironed out for a relationship to be successful don't have to be -- and on that point at least we are agreed.
Some things you can expect to read about on Wormbook in the next two weeks:
- First impressions of the Kindle
- How much I have in library fines (it might surprise you!)
- Plus reviews of SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT, THE LOST SYMBOL and, speaking of eating, praying and loving, Elizabeth Gilbert's second book COMMITTED
2 comments:
An essay in Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs is about how we are unable to love because we have unrealistic expectations as a result of watching decades of romantic comedies, diamond advertisements, and other products of popular culture. In particular, he complains that no woman his age will ever truly love him because every woman born between 1965 and 1978 is madly in love with Lloyd Dobler.
In general, I think he is absolutely right, though anecdotally the people I know who most remind me of Lloyd Dobler have been romantically frustrated in their lives, though that is rapidly changing as my contemporaries leave their mid-20s and enter their late 20s and early 30's.
Oh, I remember that essay. I think I myself was still in love with Lloyd Dobler at the time when I read it. I think Klosterman protests too much, though.
Nehring's book in a way argues the opposite -- that emotionally we've all become too practical and unaccepting of emotional peaks and valleys. It's less about romantic actions than feelings, although there's a little of that as well in historical example.
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