Soul-Mate Mania

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Because couples in these types of marriages expect an uncommon level of emotional intimacy -- the closeness of soul mates -- they must constantly strive to maintain a high level of trust and loyalty. "This cannot be seriously undermined or threatened or changed, or the relationship is at risk," says Whitehead. "These relationships are fragile and demanding in a way that the 'good-enough' marriages of the past might not have been."

In other words, this new sort of marriage requires a lot of work.

But why should the language of labor -- diligence, perseverance, resourcefulness -- attach itself so readily to love? Why should we be so quick to accept the idea that marriage is an occupation?

To hear Northwestern University communication professor Laura Kipnis tell it, these new superrelationships -- even more than most marriages -- are doomed because such a high demand for emotional intimacy cannot be adequately met within the tedium and predictability of most committed relationships. "When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factor policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands and domestic partners of the world choke-chained to the status quo machinery -- is this really what we mean by a 'good relationship?'" she asks in her recent book Against Love (Pantheon).

Kipnis argues passionately against the inexorable rush to coupledom that characterizes our society, suggesting that marriage is a masterful mechanism for social control that systematically prevents people from living their lives to the fullest. "What a feat of social engineering to shoehorn an entire citizenry (minus the occasional straggler) into such uniform household arrangements, all because everyone knows that true love demands it and that any reluctance to participate signals an insufficiency of love," she writes. To get a steady dose of this life-affirming intimacy (not to mention good sex), she writes, you're eventually going to have to look elsewhere -- thus destroying the trust and loyalty so central to the marriage.

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