Nehring yearns for a revival of a messier ardor. In her view, we have domesticated love past all recognition, turning what is rightly leonine, destructive, and majestic into a yawning, chubby house cat. Hers is no modest project. She wants nothing less than to radicalize our framework for love, mainly by restoring its chaotic potential: “Romance in our day is a poor and shrunken thing,” she writes. “Among the many rights we must reclaim in love is the right to fail.” A Vindication of Love is not a book that will persuade every reader to jump off the couch and into the arms of a dark, smoky-eyed stranger, but it will rearrange your tidily laid out mental furniture while you’re not looking. For at its core is a well-taken point: With its emphasis on equitable marriage, “choice feminism” has endorsed a tyrannical habit of trying to subordinate passion to reason. And along the way it has demonized obsession. What, Nehring asks, is so wrong with being crazy in love?
