SMRs and AMRs

Monday, June 29, 2009

The Way We Love Now

By ROSS DOUTHAT
NYT

It’s been a good month for reckless romance in America. The nation’s most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of “Jon and Kate Plus Eight,” threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford’s Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign’s accusation of extortion against his lover’s spouse.

These irrepressible passions make a fascinating counterpoint to the complaint, advanced this month by two of the nation’s finest essayists, that modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.

In her new polemic “A Vindication of Love,” an assault on the idea of safety in romance, Cristina Nehring complains that contemporary couplings have so restrained true passion that “the poor beast has become as impotent as it is domestic.” In a post-divorce essay for The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh autopsies not only her own marriage but those of her peers, a cohort of middle-aged Los Angelenos who’ve let the quest for security turn them into sexless drudges.

(More here.)

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