It is Cristina Nehring’s opinion that romantic love in our modern era has dwindled into a shriveled, ignoble thing. After reading “A Vindication of Love,” her rousing defense of imprudent ardor and romantic excess, we may be tempted to agree — though probably not to the point of wishing to embrace quite the degree of disordering passion that Ms. Nehring so esteems.
Feminists, it should be said, may hotly disagree with Ms. Nehring, an essayist for Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. They will not like her argument that egalitarian feminism is the principal acid that has corroded romantic love.
No more the passionate hunger that swept up Tristan and Iseult, Abelard and Heloise, or even Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: The flashing ardor produced by such combustible couplings is scarcely possible in today’s feminist-dampened culture, Ms. Nehring believes. “We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence,” she says. “We imagine that we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.”
She hasn’t built an unassailable case here for the perfidy of feminism (it’s not that kind of book) or laid out prosaic steps to reignite ancient passions in the new century (it’s not that kind of book either). “A Vindication of Love” is a polemic, “an incitement to unruliness, a cry to battle.” And of her fiery lovers Ms. Nehring writes: “We need not imitate their excesses, but we gain everything from seizing their inspiration.” It’s difficult to deny that she’s on to something.
