Rating: 
Summary: Warning: This book makes you think
Review: This book is remarkably thought provoking. It is also well-written and does not lack for humor. Kipniss tackles difficult subjects: love, monogamy, social manipulation, social control. This is not an easy read. While I laughed at points, I also alternated between feeling sad, angry, self-doubting, relieved and excited. I felt. I thought. I stretched myself. Heck, I even had the priveledge of getting out my dictionary and learning a few new words.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a polemic....
Review: Ms. Kipnis helpfully clarifies her position on "love" by calling her book a "polemic". Swift's treatise on the Irish problem of over-population and famine entitled "A Modest Proposal" was also a polemic and advocated cannibalism as a solution. Ms. Kipnis is not interested in presenting an empirically based "balanced" point of view but an hyperbolically stated skewering of a supposed ideal. This is provocative (and is meant to be). It is a point of view not generally expressed and it certainly made me think although I did not always agree with her conclusions.
Rating: 
Summary: Adulters of the world unite!
Review: Adulters of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your guilt.Much of Kipnis's argument seems to build on Karl Marx's view of marriage. He attacked the institution as a hyprocritical construct of bourgeois morality. But then again, Marx had an affair with his own maid. At any rate, Kipnis's argument is hardly original, but it is outrageous enough that it is garnering a lot of buzz in the media. Personally, it seems to me like the Intellectual is merely trying to come up with a highfallutin rationalization for infidelity. Psychologists claims that adultery is more a symptom of bad marriages than the cause of marriages being bad. It deserves a serious look -- but this is not that look. Kipnis, a film studies professor and self-styled cultural critic (not a pyschologist or family therapist) wants us to believe that adultery is understandable and beneficial. Those who cheat on their spouses are not scum; they are striking a blow against psychosexual hypocrisy. Those who cheat, divorce, and remarry are sell-outs to The Cause. One can't help but think that this professor is staring down her nose at all us conventional bourgeois types who are not as enlightened as she. We have been duped into buying in to the outmoded institution of a romantically love-inspired marriage. Meanwhile, intellectuals are meeting at academic conferences, away from their spouses, and having affairs. They tell each other how smart they are, how good looking they are, and -- above all -- how they are so clever they don't need society's restricting conventions and petty morality. This book will be a bestseller for sure. Most of its buyers will be attracted by the buzz surrounding it, or they will be looking for a brilliant and famous intellectual's seal of approval for their infidelities. They will not want to admit that their behavior does hurt people and destroys families -- and this book will help them avoid that admission.
Rating:
Summary: Kiss me, Kipnis!!
Review: To steal a query from S.J.Perelman (and if you're going to pilfer a witticism, he da man), does anybody mind if I make love in public? After reading Kipnis' book, I feel liberated, as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders, as if I am at long last breathing great lungfuls of clear intellectual purity after a lifetime among the broken-spirited, colorless drudges and cat's paws of capitalistic romantic fantasy. Kipnis, you're my dream girl of the neo-Marxist relationship polemicists. This is actually a pretty good read if you're comfortable with the smart-arsed academic, tongue-in-cheek variety. There is a completely unnecessary but fun-to-read bit at the beginning about what Kipnis intends through the polemic form, and like most books written on wide ranging subjects by the professoriat, Kipnis keeps so many argumentative balls in the air at once it's like watching a Benzedrined juggler. But the notion that adulterers are a species of avant gardists who are necessarily challenging the confines and assumptions of a social institution that needs some serious thought--if not a complete overhaul--is not without merit. (Actually, it's got a lot of merit, if you give her arguments half a chance.) That we are all in thrall of the notion of monogamous domestic coupledom, and use it almost as a substitute for notions of God in a secular world, or as something approaching an Aristotelian Form, is actually pretty consonant with the evidence. Almost everybody buys into the notion that a "True Love" is "out there somewhere," that it's just a question of object (the right person--you know "The One") but almost nobody questions these things. Or that the only receptacle for adult love is religiously sanctified, state sanctioned permanent monogamy. We have, as Kipnis eloquently put it, "mortgaged our emotional well-being to intimacy institutions that hinge on elaborate fictions themselves. ..." Erich Fromm made a similar point almost 50 years ago in "The Art of Loving," but Kipnis, bless her soul, is a lot funnier. All in all, this book is an eye-opener, provocative in an elegant way, deft, devastatingly hilarious in places (the oyster metaphor on page 70 literally caused me to laugh out loud and drop the book). And if you're among the recently lovelorn (don't ask!) this book will do more to make you feel better than all of the Dr. Phil garbage in the world. My only gripe is that this book is so entertaining, so interesting, and so challenging--and the photo on the inside of the dust cover so fetching--that I wanted to take its author canoeing in the moonlight to pledge my eternal fealty to working for her happiness, and sing some Bing Crosby tunes while strumming a ukelele. My fault for reading that Giddins bio before attacking "Against Love," but, hell, some guys just never learn.
Rating:
Summary: Have courage to hear another voice other than yours
Review: To all the commentators who didn't like this book:
Have courage to hear another voice other than yours.
The institution of marriage, like it or not, is going towards extinction from the face of the earth. It is not functional and it is not useful any more. It has lost its position as the glue for keep the members of the society in their units. This is the direction of history and you can't do any thing about it.
Rating:
Summary: Funny and oddly comforting
Review: This is the best social criticism you'll read in years. It's worth the price of admission for pages 84-92 alone, where Kipnis hilariously answers the simple question, "What can't you do because you're in a couple?" If you're accidentally having an affair or even just contemplating accidentally having one, this book will make you feel less alone. I loved AGAINST LOVE.
Rating:
Summary: Right on, Professor
Review: Yes, this book is not the most "readable". But what an awsome statement! The fact alone that this book so bravely tackles such a sensitive nerve-ending as false love/failed marriage, merits its purchase and reading. This book should be required reading for all the 40ish-going-on-90-divorce-based-on-discontent women I know, who are desperately seeking that "perfect man" who will "love my formerly curvaceous (but now languid, wilty) body." Give it up old & young gals and guys, marriage didn't work for you the first 2 times, no reason to think it'll work again. And this book explains why. The reason so many reviewers (probably mostly women) denounced this book is because it yanks a self-delusional rug right out from under them; a rug called marriage. Think this book is all hogwash? Think again, and this time consider the facts: most marriages fail, strip bars are packed with married men, prostitution thrives with business from married men, and disconent married women and female divorcees offer the best sex! I know, because this single dude specifically seeks them out! This author may not have all the answers, but then again, she may.
Rating:
Summary: What a Crock!
Review: Don't have what it takes to be faithful? Looking for justification for your own lack of dignity, self-respect, and for your utter disregard for the feelings of your fellow human beings? Want to blame it all on capitalism? Well, here's your book. Again,what a crock.
Rating:
Summary: A travesty
Review: This book aids in the deconstruction of the institution of marriage!
After only a few pages, I couldn't force myself to read on through the depressing ideals miss Kipnis portrays, expressing her beliefs that in today's society monogamous relationships are no longer of importance. It's without saying that I strongly disagree with Ms. Kipnis' ideas, but none the less, I think it's a crime to bolster the idea of relationships that support non-monogamous activities, even suggest that people today should not get married and should sleep around. Eventually, if such activity, as having non-monogamous relationships continues, it will lead to the destruction of the human race, and that seems to be a fact these days! Maybe this author hasn't heard of a disease called AIDS, or even the number of other STDs that are around, and are plaguing society, which are caused by people who "sleep around".
Maybe this author doesn't come from a stable foundation, with the ideal "mother" and "father" figures, however a stable family unit is VERY important for the survival of any society. Now, I agree when the books describes many marriages as being counter-productive with the enormous rise in the divorce rate. However the number of divorces isn't a direct reflection of the change in people's expectations of marriage or their change in needs, or anything of that sort, as the book describes. The rise in divorces is caused, I think, from the fact that people get married too soon, for the wrong reasons (such as it's expected, or they are lonely-as the author mentions) or because they aren't really ready to be in a committed relationship and end up messing around on their partners.
Now, if someone gets married at the right time in the life, when they don't have unreal expectations of a partner and they are ready to commit and have a family (which by the way is the reason the human race continues-marriage and procreation seem to go hand-in-hand or it did rather before there are hundreds, even thousands of women who "accidentally" get pregnant), then marriage is a beautiful! I do not want to live in a society where having a baby out of wedlock is truly accepted. Even in today's society, although many women continue to have children outside of a stable family environment, be it with two heterosexual or homosexual partners (two parents being the key), having a child without the right family is still looked down upon. Why deprive a child of having two loving parents and why deprive the mother or having a partner? Supporting the idea that the family unit no longer needs to exist in the way it has in the past, or does in-part today is just wrong. Everyone wants to belong to a loving family, and the idea of a "family" needs to continue.
The author seems to have serious issues with the idea of marriage, and it's a shame that such opinions were published in mass quantities to make an impression upon the public that marriage is a bad thing. When people are told it's ok to not want to be monogamous this aids in the rising divorce rate, because people, as allowed to act irresponsibly. It's irresponsible to cheat on a life-partner, no matter the situation, and this type of behavior cannot become acceptable. If it becomes acceptable it should be a crime to have children. If people want to be irresponsible and "screw around", then don't have children and punish them with an unstable lifestyle.
This book lacks obvious moralistic ideals, and really gives the reader the idea that humanity is not headed in the right direction, because it's been published and the author expresses her opinions and acts as if the majority agrees with her. I just caution readers, when picking up this book take each page with a grain of salt, and read it more as a piece of fiction, than reality!
Rating: 
Summary: A counter-argument
Review: From 'The Screwtape letters' by C.S. Lewis: ...humans who have not the gift of continence can be dettered from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves 'in love', and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life as something lower than a storm of emotion.
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