Hurts So Good
Bad boys, femme fatales and impossible relationships. We’d sworn that we’d quit all that masochistic mental fun and games a while back but if we’re being real about it, we’ll concede that there’s something inexplicably alluring about that charming, intellectual that never calls you back despite all your deep conversations (and other activities), or that stunning girl that turns up at your doorstep at her convenience (and in the wee hours of the morning) and that on-off relationship that’s punctuated with addictive drama.
Cristina Nehring’s new treatise, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century has, well, vindicated our difficult love obsession. She argues that in the quest for picture-perfect relationships, crazy passion and all it inspires has been sacrificed.
“We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked and emptied of spiritual consequence … Romance in our day is a poor and shrunken thing.”
Nehring calls for throwing caution to the gusting wind - and covers celebration of failure, feminism’s fault for the passion deficit and other sexy/buzz kill areas. We’re looking forward to reading the tome but even reviews have got us hot under the collar. When we read the first lines of the NYT book review – “For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary” – we thought : really? Then we read and kinda agreed with Amanda Fortini’s central take in her Salon piece that our contemporary ideas of all-consuming ardor are perfectly in place:
“…most people long to experience love, especially love of the wildest, most complicated sort. And I would venture to guess that many have — romance born of mischief, with a co-worker, perhaps, or a professor or student; obsessive love characterized by vigilant waiting for calls and e-mails, or a humiliating inability to stop calling even after the relationship is broken. Most of us have not consciously or categorically banished passionate love from our lives, we just can’t seem to make it fit…One of the reasons…may be that we can’t seem to afford it economically or temporally.”
We also perused (and giggled a bit) Ross Douthat’s NYT Op-Ed, which reckons that mad love is well and thriving – except amongst the members of the chattering classes. Enough of other people’s thoughts, what are yours? Tell us below!
