June 24th 2009

A Vindication of Love: Just How Much Should Love Hurt?

An assistant writing professor at George Washington University taught a course a couple of years ago called “Love, American Style.” To her surprise, her students (all female) enjoyed discussing "chick lit" books like Bridget Jones’ Diary but were not inspired by deeply romantic novels such as Jane Eyre. Quick flings were okay with students, this professor told me, “but love was rarely mentioned. They were not that interested in it as a concept for their lives.”

Of all the readings she assigned, their favorite was an anthology of poetry entitled The Hell with Love.

Love is not an easy emotion for anyone to live with. For those of you who work hard and play hard, it can embrace you in what can seem a paralyzing squeeze. In the eyes of your friends, colleagues, parents, and/or teachers, love is a nice but muddy-headed emotion that you just have to get over if you want to be taken seriously as a student, a professional, a thinker.

So you're tempted to tell yourself, “I’m not ready for love,” even as you try to fight off the feelings you’re starting to have for the soccer player you met or the colleague with whom you’ve shared a couple of drinks after work.

Essayist Cristina Nehring might advise you to stop fighting and give in to those instincts.

In her new book, A Vindication of Love, Nehring comes to love’s rescue. But the emotion she describes and defends in her romp through Western literature and poetry is not necessarily the love that many of us would want as a regular diet. In fact, it’s a dangerous kind of love that could lead some women and men to make exceedingly bad choices. (She opens with the passion-story of 18th-century author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who twice attempted suicide over a man.)

But it is romantic love, all the same--the love, for example, of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet for Fitzwilliam Darcy, or of Emily Dickinson’s letters to her “Master.” And, to Nehring’s credit, she is not afraid to defend it. Nehring never actually tells us what love is, but she has quite a bit to say about what love is not.

It is not, for example, “sex-on-tap,” or “the relentless emphasis on sexual climax that…has a largely depleting effect on the life of the emotions.” “When erotic intimacy is available at the tap of a mouse,” she writes, “or, indeed, at the amiable request of one’s household partner (“what about a quickie before lunch, dear?”); when magazines nudge us to “claim” orgasms as we do receipts at the end of our transactions at Starbucks; when Broadway hits like Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues have women hollering the names of their genitals and baking cakes in their shape, then sex has simply become too available.”

This availability makes romance impossible, she says, because romance depends on “other-ness, tension, and reserve.” Absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder.

Love is also not an equal partnership, in her view. It is the ardor of a college student for her professor, a young man for an older man. It is frequently not sanctioned – bravo the adulterer! – and even forbidden, as in “Don’t go near that player. He’s only using you.”

Hers is not a pretty love. She writes: “I bear the bodily scars of a loss or two in love. I have been derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love.”

Such words may comfort those who have pursued a love affair that was as exhausting as it was exhilarating, that threatened one’s mental, and even physical, health. It may also encourage some girls to ask what they’ve missed.

And it may provoke readers such as Anne Kubitsky, a 26-year-old designer and writer, to say, “Been there, done that, not going there again.” Nehring’s description of love, says Anne, “sounds a lot like what I thought love was in high school and college, and this led to extreme emotions and behaviors that were not good.” True love, she says, is not needy, and comes only after you know you are “whole, complete, and have everything you need to be happy, fulfilled, and satisfied.”

Anne provides a clue as to why the students of “Love, American Style” so appreciated The Hell with Love, which is described as “a one-of-a-kind collection that helps you through the classic stages of heartbreak.” Perhaps they too had been there and done that.

Those who value the secure, companionable love that Anne describes may wish for another book to sit beside The Hell with Love and A Vindication – a book that tells stories of compassion, as well as passion, and the sweet splendor of everyday love.

Have you ever experienced the kind of love Christina Nehring describes?

Would you want to experience it (again)?