While KipnisвЂ™ exaggerated polemic romp is wittily invigorating, it may not actually be as radical as it promises to be: These days, even sitcoms reflect her way of thinking. And Kipnis spends scant time thinking about the fact that marriage is a hardy social institution several thousand years old, spanning many cultures-which calls into question, to say the least, whether its presence in our lives today has mostly to do with the insidious chokehold capitalism has on us. While itвЂ™s certainly true that people stay in an unhappy relationship longer than they should, itвЂ™s not yet clear that monogamy is more вЂњunnaturalвЂќ than sleeping around but finding that the hum of your refrigerator is your most constant companion. People are more than happy to talk about how unhappy their individual marriages are, but public discussion assumes that in each case there is something wrong with the marriage-not marriage itself. And sheвЂ™s diagnosed something interesting about the public discourse of marriage. She is dead-on about the everyday exhaustion a relationship can produce.

KipnisвЂ™ ideological tack might easily have been as heavy as Frederick EngelsвЂ™ in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, but she possesses the gleeful, viperish wit of a Dorothy Parker and the energetic charisma of a cheerleader. You feel you owe something, or youвЂ™re afraid of being alone, and so you вЂњworkвЂќ at your relationship, like a prisoner in Siberia ice-picking away at the erotic permafrost. And the price of this subordination is immense: Domestic cohabitation is a вЂњgulagвЂќ marriage is the rough equivalent of a credit card with zero percent APR that, upon first misstep, zooms to a punishing 30 percent and compounds daily. Her quasi-Marxist argument sees desire as inevitably subordinated to economics. KipnisвЂ™ answer is that marriage is an insidious social construct, harnessed by capitalism to get us to have kids and work harder to support them.

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