Laura Kipnis ''Love's Labors”

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Laura Kipnis ”Love’s Labors”

Kipnis Against Love is a controversial book about love, infidelity and marriage. It looks into the discontents of domestic and heterosexual relationships. She clearly states that the purpose of the book is to “poke holes in cultural pieties and turn received wisdom on its head” (Kipnis 4). Chapter one of the book is Love’s labors. It talks about the contradictions and intrigues of love in the modern world. In this essay, she exposes loves power over us and ridicules our beliefs to drive her point home. She states, “If love has powers over us, what a sweepingly effecting form of power this proves to be, with every modern psyche equally subject to its caprices…”(Kipnis 398). According to her views, love poses absolute control over our psyche and it uses fear as a weapon to regulate our thoughts.

Kipnis argues that the current high levels of divorce rate in our society are attributed to our idealized definition of love. She suggests that we have set unrealistic standards for love, and further we have incorporated the puritan work ethic into our relationships. This is best illustrated by the current marriage counselors’ cliché “good marriages work”. Her view on current marriage couples is that they are “choke-chained to the status quo” (Kipnis 19)

From a conservatism point of view, she says that love is a product of social design and that it promotes cultural uniformity. The main controversy on love is her view on adultery. Adultery as defined by Kipnis is “the nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary couple Dom.” (28) She stresses that marriage therapy and mass media are the root causes of this social ill. These institutions socialize us to integrate within the social structure without questioning the validity and relevance of these social structures. The media portrays ever happy and loving couples, perfect couples. This gives the masses the wrong perception hence they expect the same in their relationships which is contrally to reality. She views adultery as a vent that married couples have to express their marital frustrations and later argues that adulterers should not be judged because they are “protesting societal norms” (Kipnis 409).

Kipnis view on monogamy as the acceptable family model is very intriguing. She argues that monogamy has been popularized by media houses by constantly portraying it as the only sheer basis of marital love. She sees adultery as an off spring this idolizing of monogamy. Adultery is one of the affects of “unplanned exposures” that occur when our marriage expectations are not fulfilled (Kipnis 44). According to Kipnis, the body responds to social expectations by reacting either negatively or positively to the environment. Ailments like “insomnia, migraines, cold sore, digestive ailments, and heart palpitations” can be as result of failure to get our idealized partner.

She is annoyed about how most marriage couples sanctify their marriage and perceive anything else to be wrong. She further drags adultery into that marriage mix, by claiming it is a drudgery of wedded couples. This gives the perception that she is pro adultery in marriages by arguing that they are unavoidable. However, from her tone it is evident that she only tries to make people be open-minded and accept some set backs in marriages as natural human error. In Kipnis perspective, society views the marriage institution in a passionate cult like manner further making it to be rigid. This makes it difficult for the couples to solve their problems. Her view of marriage is that it is a relentless, repressive and prohibitive social institution.

References

Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Print.