"ill all the adulterers in the room please stand up?" So begins Against Love: A Polemic (Pantheon, $24), Laura Kipnis' wickedly smart rumination on modern monogamy. Covering a range of subjects — from philandering politicians to the debate over gay marriage — Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, casts a sharp and playfully mocking eye over the landscape of committed coupledom. In her provocative and disarmingly funny analysis, cheating partners become "small-scale social saboteurs" simply by wanting — and taking— more than social convention allows.

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It's a timely observation. Although sexual self-reporting is notoriously unreliable, a trend seems to be emerging: According to a 1990 Kinsey Institute report, 37% of men and 29% of women have had at least one sexual partner outside of their marriage. More recently, several British studies found that up to 55% of husbands and wives will cheat at least once. And earlier this year, gender-studies professor Susan Shapiro Barash released her findings that 60% of married women have at least one affair — and 90% of them feel "no guilt" about it. Yet despite the grim statistics and a serious lack of role models in happy, lasting marriages, 94% of single young adults surveyed for Rutgers' Marriage Project still want their spouses to be their ?soul mate, first and foremost". And 88% believe their ?soul mate? is out there waiting for them.

Is it possible to reconcile our conflicting desires for personal freedom and emotional security? Must intimate relationships feel like work? Why is there so much anxiety and domestic policing involved in remaining coupled? And what, exactly, is so wrong with wanting something more? Laura Kipnis interrupted her work on a new book about political scandals to talk with Nerve about adultery, politics and whether relationships are fixable. — Emily Mead



Nerve: Your last book [Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America] was about porn. This one's about adultery. Do you get hate mail from Pat Robertson?
Laura Kipnis: The only really terrible experience I had was when I got myself inveigled — because of my own stupidity — into being on the Michael Medved Show. He just tried to back me into the corner and rant at me about child porn, and I had this macho pride and I thought, "I can just argue my way out of this." [But] those guys are so good at what they do that if they want to make you dog meat, you're going to be. He was a master at his evil art. I got emails for weeks.

What prompted you to write about marriage and adultery?
I just wanted to cut out some of the moralizing that goes on in the public context about marriage and love these days and return it to the complicated, ambivalent enterprise that it is — something that wasn't just the usual moral condemnation.

"Desires get channeled into the equivalent of police states."

Why did you choose to take such a playful, mischievous tone to address a 'serious' topic? And why write a polemic?
I was trying to recapture some of the feeling that you have when you're writing love letters — when you're trying to entice someone, or you know someone is enticed by you. If there's playfulness in the writing, it's the playfulness of being in love. It's a freeing way to write: you don't have to be responsible and make both sides of the argument. And there's something so fun about being the provocateur.

Why do you think that, the notion that we have a "soul mate," is so powerful despite all the evidence that it's rarely sustainable?
It's not that I'm interested in trying to dismantle the desire [to couple]. Desire is irreducible. What's interesting to me is how those desires get channeled into particular social forms that end up being, to be a little hyperbolic about it, the equivalent of police states. Why does the desire for connection, intimacy, love and happiness — all of which are good things in themselves — produce these personally and socially restrictive forms that have so much to do with controlling another person and trying to make relationships last beyond a point when, by all rights, they should be over? The book addresses this ambivalence and contradiction and the way that we're all muddling through it.

You gently mock the ways that work ethics permeate intimate relationships. But isn't some work in relationships worthwhile?
I'm interested in how these things play out in contexts larger than just personal life. How does this "working at your relationship" support other kinds of work ethics, other kinds of lack of choice, other kinds of complacency? I think there is a diminishment of other forms of collective activity, collective social life. So sure, working at your relationship (although I can't tell you how much I hate that phrase) can be helpful, but at the same time, it reinforces this aspect of social life that all we do is work.

If every era has different standards and expectations of love, how do you think coupledom in the information age will change?
The problem with this new industrial revolution is that it isn't leading to any greater fulfillment in work or less work. It's the opposite. It seems that in every sphere, the levels of freedom and gratification are getting reduced. One of the arguments I'm trying to make is that even in domestic life, there's so much policing going on, and so much restriction of mobility, that people become so accustomed to acquiescing to these endless numbers of rules and restrictions and quashed desires that it produces political complacency. And the political argument of the book is that love, of all things, becomes this way of producing acquiescence and complacence and turning us all into political chumps.

"I'm not really against love — how can you be? 'Against' has two meanings. It means opposed to, but it also means next to."

Whereas a passion for more is an imagination-spurring force?
Yes. It is the basis for utopianism. That, for me, is the interesting thing about adultery. It's this one little corner where people aren't saying, "Yes, I'll accept less. That wage cut is fine with me. Sure, happy to work an extra ten hours a week." I understand everybody wants to know, "How do I fix my personal life? What possibilities for happiness are there in love for me?' But I don't have an answer. It's hilarious: If you write a book called Against Love, you get asked for advice about how to fix it. I'm trying to say that maybe it's not fixable because it's not just a personal-life question.

If you were setting the domestic policy agenda these days, I suspect it would be very different from that of the current administration. What would you do if you were in charge?
How about yearly renewable contracts? One of the problems is that all of the different definitions of love — there's the passion/lust thing, there's the connection/affection thing, the child rearing — all of those get collapsed now into this one poor institution that's supposed to bear the burden of all of that. I'm not really against love — how can you be? The point of the title is that 'against' has two meanings. It means opposed to, but it also means next to.

Sorry, but I have to ask: Are you, or have you been, in a committed monogamous relationship?
I've been coupled, I've been uncoupled, I'm pretty much like everyone else. But it's not really based on my life and my relationships. It's social observation, listening how people talk to each other and are furious at each other for unspecified reasons. At some level, that's the impetus for the book: looking at the levels of disappointment, sadism, and resentment that are just considered part of normal life.

To buy Against Love: A Polemic, click here.

?2003 Emily Mead and Nerve.com.