Love is a battlefield | Tomorrow Museum

This is an aside titled 'Love is a battlefield' dated 12/1/09

Emily Gould reviews Christina Nehring. This was (almost) worth Dreamhost’s unfortunate delay this evening, “for Nehring, truly loving means embracing pain. She disdains Valentine’s roses, cozy snuggling, even vibrators—all the sappy rituals and pathetic artifacts our culture has produced to compensate for an epidemic lack of passion. By contrast, Nehring’s old-style ‘love’ is “a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism … ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess.” Today’s ‘love’ is commodified and ordinary and perpetually available. It can no longer ennoble our souls.” I really love Nehring’s essays about boring essayists, but I can definitely see where the book turned into a “book-length version of the famous SNL ‘My Lovahhhh’ sketch… She becomes less a defender of love than a defender of herself in love, which is different.”

Posted by Joanne on Dec. 1, 2009

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