When love hurts you know it's good

Cristina Nehring's new book A Vindication of Love , a "thinking person's guide to romantic love," is rubbing thinking people the wrong way. In it, the American essayist challenges our culture's condemnation of volatile entanglements - and blasts healthy and sensible relationships as "settling."

Romantic love, Ms. Nehring writes, "was always a faith ," not a "lifestyle choice." It is the kind of love that gives more and takes more, and "never leaves us undamaged." Today, though, the emotion has become little more than "a cause for embarrassment."

What's to blame? Pragmatism, materialism, cynicism, feminism and the commodification of sex, the author argues.

Using extensive references, from literary characters Tristan and Iseult to real-life spouses Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Ms. Nehring celebrates impetuous romances - the kind any therapist would caution against.

The author does not promote her tome as a self-help book, and acknowledges the relationships she touts are "extreme cases." Still, she says, the examples are meant to inspire and instigate, and to expand people's romantic horizons.

Ms. Nehring spoke with The Globe and Mail about why it's good to bicker with your spouse, and slip love notes into his briefcase.

"Sobriety and self-protectiveness" have helped create an erotic culture that is "almost unendurably bland," you write. How did this come to be?

There are a host of factors working in tandem here. One is the trivialization of sex. We have lost all sense that erotic activity can be charged or important; that it can mean something; that it can reflect or create a bond between persons.

We try dangerously hard to risk nothing: to walk away if our heartthrob is obsessive-compulsive, an alcoholic, a workaholic, a shopaholic, a commitment-phobe, a child of a broken family. We buy manuals warning us away from two-thirds of the world's population. The people who are left usually bore us to tears. Puritan work ethic that we have, we work on making things exciting.

You say feminist resentment has played into the issue. How?

Precisely because the meaning of feminism, for a long time, was self-assertion against men. You cannot love the man you are fighting - especially not sentimentally, unconditionally, dreamily, passionately. It would be a terrific embarrassment and a blow to your feminist credentials. Which, for a long time, it was. But today this cynical distance is an outdated obstacle, a uselessly dangling ladder that it's time to kick away.

You write that "anyone who has ever fallen in love knows it's a full-time job;" that "love is a jealous god, and does not leave its new recruits much more time than for the composition of letters, e-mails, text messages." How does that jell with a 40-plus-hour work week?

In our present workaholic environment, it is true, to be a lover is not always easy. And then again, it's possible. Love thrives on the overcoming of obstacles. It pours adrenalin into our veins. We are more productive when we love - though perhaps in different ways.

Every relationship has rhythms. Some of these stages invoke the sort of feverish, around-the-clock hyper-communication conveyed above; others allow for shared work, a gentler pace.

Many of the couples you write about spar constantly. They "seem elected to fight each other." Isn't this exhausting for people and upsetting for their family and friends?

I do not mean to suggest we should fight constantly. But very few live relationships stay that way without a modicum of creative combat. If we are willing to fight in our work lives, we should be willing to fight for and in our love lives. What we don't fight for we don't enjoy.

What happens if the object of affection is plainly a pig? Do you think it's still worth a heady pursuit?

One should avoid pigs at all costs. But there are a lot of them out there, so one does well to remember that we are ultimately responsible not for the character of the person we love, but for the character of our own love.

You devote a chapter to romantic correspondence. It brought to mind South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's abundant e-mail correspondence with his Argentine mistress, the moonlight raining down on her breasts and such. What does it say about our culture that love letters are now largely the domain of adulterers?

"Without adultery, Western literature would not exist," said the literary scholar Denis de Rougemont. Probably a lot of memorable romantic correspondence took place between adulterers, even in the golden past.

The point, then and now, is to claim that transgressive and expressive energy in relationships that have some chance of enduring, and hurting the people around us minimally. This takes esprit and initiative. It takes the ability to see the woman in your bathroom and the man at your kitchen sink as mysterious, attractive, erotic agents - not mere household accessories. It takes the capacity to confide in them riskily, escape with them slyly, question them thirstily, court them surprisingly and sometimes on paper, to assume that there is infinitely more to know about them than meets the eye, even the eye of a decades-long companion.

You believe that we stand poised at the opening of a new era of "romantic hope, of greater trust between genders and fresh daring among lovers." Why?

I think people are impatient and bored with the old safe sex/safe love paradigm. We have plumbed the depths of sex for its own sake. … We realize that the right to be amorous and sentimental, emotionally courageous and romantically entrepreneurial may be the last right left to reclaim for the progressive members of our gender today. We've got the reproductive rights, the respect, the jobs, the suits, and the sex: What we need to seize now is the right to love.

You write that a "loss or two" in love has left you hospitalized, bodily scarred and flung you across five continents. What is your personal experience?

I have, generally, been extremely lucky in love. I have also suffered at least one heartwrenching loss - a man with whom I lived for many years who suddenly broke our engagement. The experience provoked - mysteriously and dramatically - a rare skin disease in me. I was sent to the hospital in Paris for a week to try to reverse its effects. I still bear marks of it, yes.

I have been very happy in love since. The father of my infant daughter - who is a fiery Greek pirate of a boy, some years younger than I - wanted to marry and I declined. As impassioned and consuming as our relationship was for two years, he was very difficult as a father and potential husband. To wed him would have meant to move to the island of Crete, give up my identity as a writer, social-literary critic and globetrotter, and embrace a very traditional way of living. I decided, after some agony, against this.

I am presently in a tender and promising new relationship.