Are You Working Hard At Your Relationship?

If you weren't working hard enough at work, now you're expected to work hard at getting hard guys, even for the same woman you've shared a bed for 25 years with -- is that reasonable? Is this what the notion of working 24X7 has driven us to?

I'm reading a most amazing book, Against Love by Laura Kipnis where she suggests we've all gone off the deep end in America in terms of bringing the Puritan work ethic to the bedroom. She suggests giving up on "working at your marriage" and put a little passion in your life -- it's called adultery.

Some snippets:

"Nevertheless, our age dedicates itself to allying the turbulence of romance and the rationality of the long-term couple, hoping to be convinced despite all evidence to the contrary that love and sex are obtainable from one person over the course of decades, and that desire will manage to sustain itself over thirty or forty or fifty years of cohabitation (Should desire unaccountably sputter out, just give up sex; lack of libido for your mate is never an adequate rationale for "looking elsewhere.") Of course both parties must also work at keeping passion alive (what joy), given the presumption that even after living in close proximity to someone for an historically unprecedented length of time, you will still muster the requisite fizz to achieve sexual congress on a regular basis."

"And true enough, some couples do manage to perform enough psychical retooling to reshape the anarchy of desire to the confines of the marriage bed, plugging away at the task year after year like diligent assembly line workers (once a week, same time, same position), aided by the occasional fantasy or two to get the old motor to turn over, or keep running, or complete the trip. The erotic life of a nation of workaholics; if sex seems like work, clearly you're not working hard enough at it."