by JUAN RODRIGUEZ

She was ready to turn on the dishwasher before going to work. I was halfway through my second morning coffee when she grabbed the cup. "Hey, I live here too!" I protested. "Get out," she responded. That was 13 years ago. Having been a serial monogamist for two decades, I haven't lived with anyone since. Occasional loneliness is the tradeoff for being able to do whatever I damn well please, whenever. In the process I've become a sourpuss vis-à-vis couples. I silently sneer at their glum faces as they order each other about - invariably starting with the word "don't" - in the dance that transforms "lovers" into little dictators. Alas, there's more to love than that, the therapists tell me.

All of which to say I've been salivating for the arrival of Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis, professor of radio-TV-film at Northwestern University, former video artist, and author of 1999's provocative Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Duke). Her "treatise on the tyranny of two" is as feisty as it gets in today's relentlessly therapeutic public culture.

Her main portal is adultery, the flip side of "relationships" that drives the information economy with grimy persistence: "Adultery is one way of protesting the confines of coupled life; of course there's always murder." Thus the public spectacle that attended Bill Clinton's philandering (which made the world's most powerful politician "feel alive" like every other cheating schmo) and Hillary's stubborn stoicism (the wronged woman milked to the max). These ambitious boomers, leading separate yet intertwined lives, still seem to love each other in a perplexingly modern marriage-in-progress. The sideshow included hectoring prudes like Newt Gingrich denouncing them as enemies of normal Americans, while getting some on the side.

Kipnis is inspired by Marx - both Karl and Groucho: "Yes, we all know that Good Marriages Take Work: we've been well tutored in the catechism of labor-intensive intimacy... Work/home, office/bedroom: are you ever not on the clock? Good relationships may take work, but unfortunately, when it comes to love, trying is always trying too hard: work doesn't work. Erotically speaking, play is what works."

At times Kipnis belabours her point - "piling on" an easy target (and grim statistics: half of marriages end in divorce, and between 20 and 70 per cent of couples report some "straying"). Her viewpoint is so archly contrary to the feel-good culture that anything she says sounds hyperbolic. Isn't "working" at keeping "passion" alive a contradiction in terms, or does that process offer innumerable rewards in themselves (aka maturity)? When is the desire to get close replaced by possession? Why is that cloying euphemism "significant other" always parsed in the singular? Being prepared to meet your partner's demands (aka mutuality) "presumes, of course, that the majority of those needs can and should be met by one person." Question this, she says, and you question the very foundations of the institution.

Her view of coupling is admittedly narrow, in which faithfulness is "preemptively secured through routine interrogations (‘Who was that on the phone, dear?'), surveillance (‘Do you think I didn't notice how much time you spent talking to X at the reception?'), or impromptu search and seizure."

Kipnis' eye for jaundiced repartee reminded me of a highly intellectualized, and excitably energetic, Charles Bukowski (specifically Women, which existentially and infernally revolves around lust and jealousy, need and desire, a little tenderness - and a lot of drinking): "The first kiss, the first fuck had some drama. People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves."

Sure this misanthrope received as much toxic pleasure reading Against Love as I did with Women. In a cantankerous way (not unlike Bukowski), Kipnis issues a challenge not to give up on the romantic spirit. I'll stick with pop music on this: love the one you're with. If you love somebody, set them free.

Against Love: A Polemic, by Laura Kipnis,
Pantheon Books, 224pp, $36