Jesse Orr

4-7-14

English 1010

Kipnis Essay

Love in My Own Way

“My idea of love is so screwed up. Oh God, here we go. I think it’s something

that people feel they have to feel. Wow you’re such a slow typer Jess. Oh geez where

was I? Wait, don’t write that! Okay, umm it’s a really hard thing to think of, I don’t

know! I love my cat, and I guess my parents, but I don’t know what it means. Is this

going to be your whole essay? 5 pages? Shoot.” When simply asked the question:

“What do you think of love?” Sam stumbled through her words. She had no earthly

clue as to what she truly felt on the matter. She racked her brain, slurred her words,

wandered from the topic, and muttered about her cat. Now I ask you, do you really

know what love means to you? Are you the hopeless romantic with whom I

collaborate, or are you a loner, one who needs independence more than love to exist

in his time upon this world? I believe love is without definition, but crucially

necessary to one’s self-definition. The writer Laura Kipnis has a proposes a differing

perspective. She poses the polemic of love being a social prison, a cruel method

simply to keep individuals retained, monitored, and controlled. In her words, she

poses that love is a drug. “Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucenic” and “All the

advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” These are words

quoted by Kipnis on page 405 when she referenced a few characters’ words from

the movie Brave New World. Now that I’ve thoroughly confused you, mislead you,

and disoriented you, allow me to start my argument from the bottom up, my

previous words are meant only to prime you for the strife and conflict ahead.

Now to begin, in my eyes love has slowly and meticulously formed and

shaped our upbringings. Think about it. Love is even what brought you into this

world. Or tequila, but that’s beside the point. You know the time-old excuse: when a

mommy and a daddy love each other very much…yada yada yada. You get my point.

Take Kipnis’s spin on this. Think about love as a prison. A social institution used to

manipulate and complicate relationships through a menacing web of control. Such a

conundrum leaves a lover no choice but to resort to infidelity. “Yes, adulterers:

playing around, breaking vows, causing havoc. Or…maybe not just playing around?

After all, if adultery is a de facto referendum on the sustainability of monogamy_and

it would be difficult to argue it’s not_ this also makes it the nearest thing to a popular

uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom.” (Kipnis, 399) Such a

negative context is placed upon this horrifying practice of low-life scum, but please

just bear with me. Theoretically, compare the relationship you’re in right now to the

aforementioned prison. Just think, you’re happy in your relationship for the most

part, but there’s that small margin of discontent that eats away at you. It’s like being

under house arrest. Yeah you’re happy where you are, but you look out the open

window and see all the things you can’t be doing. It’s that proverbial window that

drives one to… (*gasp) cheat. Is cheating really wrong if placed under this

comparison? Could it not be celebrated as a liberator of social injustice? It’s like the

vigilante hero of relationships. Adultery comes in, storms the castle, and frees the

imprisoned. All the while, this vigilante is wrong in many eyes, but yet so right in

countless others. Adultery is scowled upon, scoffed at, and yet so many people

commit the deed. Adultery has started wars, e.g. Cleopatra, and has changed

countries, Bill Clinton… need I say more? I mean, c’mon Bill. Getting with Hilary

must be tough to begin with, but Lewinski? Geez.

Now that I’ve convinced you of the imprisonment that comes with this

priceless euphoric whim, let me explain how this jail can actually be a haven. Case

and point: Modern Love. In this story, a normal guy falls in love with a germophobe.

His love is so evident in the sex scene of the story. (Jumping in at the best part, I

know). It was dinner at her place after a month of reserved but fun dating. A few

kisses were shared, an inciting comment was made, then Breda, the germophobe,

disappeared into the bathroom and returns with a plastic parcel. She tells the

narrator that it’s a Swedish body-condom. She begs him to wear this thing. “Do it for

me, if you really love me.” Finally he did it. (The lengths to which we men go for sex

are truly impressive I must say.) Many of my classmates say he was ridiculous for

going to the lengths he did for love, but I disagree. I’m not saying I’d endure the

mortifying body-condom, but I am saying that deep down, he didn’t mind the

synthetic shroud. He donned it fully knowing this was drawing him closer to Breda,

the crazy germophobe. That’s what mattered to him. Her comfortableness and

satisfaction were priorities in his mind. Satisfying her meant he satisfied himself. If

she was happy, so was he. Right there is love. As sick as it was, he was in a haven of

sorts. The meticulous and antagonizing habits would have driven any normal guy

mad, but not this man. Her quirks were what he seemed to love most. If they weren’t

he would have talked about something else that he loved. These little quirks were

what made him smile as he fell asleep, and what made him patiently and graciously

slip into the European body-condom to join Breda in the bedroom. Those traits were

his heaven, and he knew it.

Now that I have presented two facets of this beautiful pain called love, I make

the argument supported by hopeless romantics such as myself. What is life without

love? What is the point? Why bother ever relating with someone if you never intend

to love him or her? I know for myself that I am nothing but the love that fills me. For

it was love that formed me, love that trained me, love that helped me, and love that

saved me. Whether you relate that to your parents, family members, or even your

God if you so choose. We were all formed of the same love, and it is that same love

that will hold our legacy.

Now I address you loners and you cynics. Hold your opinion with all your

might, I dare you. Your hopes of social withdraw and liberation from this passionate

prison amuse me. In the end, I know that you will be the miserable ones while I

laugh and weep in my beautiful torment. Though love may cut deeply, love will heal.

With that healing brings a fresh sense of fulfillment, new life, and blissful hope.

Compare it to the fresh showers of springtime. The roads may get muddy and the

girls’ hair may frizz from the humidity, but in the morning arises a new soul for the

time. A new purpose has arisen. Love is that new soul. Love is that muddy road

beaten and worn by screeching tires. Love is that humidity that just frustrates some

for reasons not understood by me, but I digress. Love simply is. Love fulfills, and

most importantly, love completes.

“How do you know this Jess? You’re eighteen years old!” I’m sure you’re

mentally screaming at this essay. Maybe I have gotten a grip on this early on in my

life, and maybe, just maybe I’m completely wrong. Perhaps Kipnis is right all along

when she says love is just a regulation. Simply a mechanism to monitor one another.

A drug maybe? “Clearly love is subject to just as much regulation as any powerful

pleasure-inducing substance. Whether or not we fancy that we love as we please,

free as the birds and butterflies, and endless quantity of social instruction that exists

to tell us what it is, and what to do with it, and how, and when.” (405) You see,

Kipnis is taking the cynical prisoner approach I mentioned earlier. She feels as

though society is simply selling love as a new self-help product. A drug to inhibit and

enhance a feeling of fulfillment is simply sold to the public wholesale! “Join our

dating site where you pay us do all the meeting, greeting, and research that you

should do for yourselves, you lazy swine.” is what should be eHarmony’s motto. But

no, instead it’s “Connect today in the nation’s highest statistic in satisfied marriages

and blah blah blah we want your money.” The fact that we as Americans hire nerds

and computers to do our dating for us just boggles me, but that’s beside the point. At

any rate, I will return to Kipnis after my spiel on online dating. Kipnis is right in a

sense. She views love as Foucault’s panopticon: an endless supervision and

monitoring of society’s unmanageable delinquents. I say “unmanageable” because

I’ve seen what people do for love, and I know what I’ve done for it. Geez I feel like a

crusader for a cause, full of perseverance, love’s martyr and I’m only 18…

Now briefly, I’d like to address a personal petpieve of mine when it comes to

love and passion and whatnot. Love is not weakness. Love is not a dependence upon

a drug. Love is liberation, and love is strength. In these passions in which we find

ourselves, we find not only our faults and flaws, but we find the strongholds in our

hearts that we would never have seen otherwise. Yes, love beats you down, and true,

love is fickle, but love is beautiful. Those who reate with my words are not only tue

lovers, but fighters to the core.

You say I’m a sadist, a glutton for punishment perhaps. Think what you will

and live on in your misery, distrust, and self-loathing. I have no need for such things

in my life. I will find the haven into which the writer of “Modern Love” had slipped. I

will fall madly for those quirks. Perhaps I will fall for her occasional OCD moments,

the way her nose wrinkles when she thinks, perhaps her puppy face when I refuse

to give her more of my chocolate-covered pomegranate thingies. Maybe I will fall

deeper for her when she steals the bag anyways. No matter what her little

idiosyncrasies may be, I will love her and yes, I know I will hurt from her one day. Is

it worth it? Absolutely.