Book of the week: A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century by Cristina Nehring

(Harper, 328 pages, $24.99)

Romance in our time “is a poor and shrunken thing,” says essayist Cristina Nehring. Sex has become a casual pastime and marriage has devolved into an arrangement approached with elaborate caution. “Every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence.” Feminism, in Nehring’s view, bears much of the blame for love’s anemic state. Women who admit to unruly romantic passion have long been tagged as soft-minded, but the unfortunate modern response was to demystify and domesticate love. To “put oneself entirely in another’s hands” obviously risks disempowerment. But in attempting to protect ourselves, we have smothered the passion that life demands.

It doesn’t escape Nehring that the word “passion” derives from the Latin word for suffering, said Meghan O’Rourke in Slate.com. As she “compellingly argues, romantic love depends on power imbalances,” on compulsion, on “the very things that feminism has tried to strip out of women’s lives.” If the price of loving with abandon is the possibility of “pain, heartache, and loneliness,” she’s willing to pay it. In fact, her stirring polemic “revels” in the “inner agonies of the love-tossed,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. Nehring’s heroes and heroines—from Tristan and Iseult to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath to “the mother of modern feminism,” Mary Wollstonecraft—all were wounded for their ardency. Perhaps she touches too lightly “on the misery to others—particularly children—that adult passions can wreak.” But it’s “difficult to argue” against her contention that art and history’s most fiery lovers should be inspirations.

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Part of “the appeal, the freshness” of A Vindication of Love is that Nehring is prone to melodramatic overstatement, said Katie Roiphe in The New York Times. Even so, she never directly takes on “the vast continent of quietly married people” who are the implicit target of her diatribe. There’s a “polite vagueness at the heart of the book,” even though her argument raises confounding practical questions. She wants romance to be brutal, demanding, even deranged. “Can one actually live according to the rich and exhausting principles Nehring sets out?” Even if none of us is brave enough to follow her, she’s given us “one of those rare books” powerful enough to make us think about our intimate lives “in a new way.”