From another review of Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis:
[Kipnis argues] that marriage is an insidious social construct, harnessed by capitalism to get us to have kids and work harder to support them. Her quasi-Marxist argument sees desire as inevitably subordinated to economics. And the price of this subordination is immense: Domestic cohabitation is a "gulag"; 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. You feel you owe something, or you're afraid of being alone, and so you "work" at your relationship, like a prisoner in Siberia ice-picking away at the erotic permafrost.
Meghan O'Rourke makes the point near the end of the review that "work" does not have to be such a bad, that there are things we work at that we enjoy. See also: a quote from Anne Kingston's review of the same book.
