It's a privilege to read a book like this -- written by a philosopher who carefully and lovingly provides the outlines of a modern metaphysics (relax: it's not that complicated) of romantic love. The philosopher's tool-kit is designed to pick apart arguments in order to see what makes sense and what doesn't, and Jenkins wields this toolkit with panache.
Love, she writes, has a dual nature. It is an ancient biological motivation system, called on to play a role in a social script. Something like this formulation has already been at work in society's recent acknowledgement that gays and lesbians, whose motivations have different targets than the rest of us, have a right to marry -- and thereby to be welcomed into the dominant social script.
It's a bit more challenging, Jenkins writes, if we begin to imagine quite different social scripts -- such as polyamory. Social facts aren't any less real than biological ones. They're powerful, they can hurt you, and they're not easy to change.
This book makes an invaluable contribution to the study of romantic love. It invites people of all romantic orientations to examine "amatonormative" thinking (the idea that if you don't fall in love in the usual way, there's something wrong with you), and to imagine alternatives for the future. We'll all be better off, Jenkins argues, if we make use of the philosopher's toolkit to sort out exactly what we can change, and what we can't.
The book is at once realistic and hopeful, and I recommend it highly to any educated reader with an interest in what love is. Therapists, sex therapists, and activists for social change will all find this book useful.
By the way, the author is herself polyamorous -- a fact she tells us in paragraph two of the book. This is something still rather unusual, and in many places in the world it would be quite dangerous to admit. To her credit, she generally avoids slipping into memoir-mode. But the fact of her own personal stake in the matter hovers always in the background, giving a sense of urgency to her project of thinking as clearly as possible about what love is -- and what it could be.
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Top reviews from other countries
Camille Beaujolie
Excellent philosophical exploration of the nature of love.
Reviewed in Canada on March 17, 2017
KatM
It is very interesting and a good mix of history
Reviewed in Canada on March 10, 2017