I’ll try it; I’ll try it.

But I do warn, Ms. Nehring would need to have written the next manifesto for me to have respect for her after her Passionate Defense of Mark Sanford.

Incidentally, Mr. Sanford is now explaining to anyone who will listen (and maybe to inanimate objects, too; I don’t know) that he needs to stay in office to improve his character. Alas, I don’t think that is what the people of South Carolina elected him to do.

What is a “failed” marriage? Unless the definition is “marriage that ends in divorce and not in death”, then that seems like a difficult thing get hard numbers on. If that *is* the definition you’re using, then IMO it’s an old-fashioned and oversimplified one. Let’s say two people get marry for love. They spend several years enjoying each other’s company, helping each other to grow as people, and supporting each other during rough times. They fall out of love, or more worldly concerns, such as money, cause problems they don’t know how to work through. In the end, they part on relatively good terms, and both are better, happier people for the years they spent together. Let’s say another couple marry because, according to some rational measure, they decide they would be a good match, though they don’t really love each other. They try to be dutiful spouses, but over time, their situations change, and they’re no longer a good match — rationally or emotionally. They each feel like they’ve been deceived and trapped; they resent their partners. But they believe that the only failure of a marriage is one that ends in divorce, so they remain together, but become miserable and bitter, sharing no romantic affection (except maybe extramaritally). Which one is a success, and which is a failure? Statistically, it may look like marriage is failing as an institution, but it seems to me that marriage is just changing. The ideal is no longer to live together until you die; it’s to have a healthy relationship for as long as it may last.

I consider myself lucky for having read it before listening to this admittedly dreadful interview.

True Love: Mark Sanford and friend.

Hmm…what to choose…

Maureen,
Thank you so much for you comment. Ross Douthat had a great snarky take on Nehring and Sandra Tsing Loh, who wrote a column in a similar vein. “The dutiful, somewhat-boring husbands from Sandra Tsing Loh’s Los Angeles, for instance, sound like ideal soulmates for Kate Gosselin, the soon-to-be-single mother of eight.

And as for Cristina Nehring, who can’t live without being “derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love” — well, maybe someone should introduce her to Mark Sanford.”

I love it when life imitates snark.

Also, thank you for other on-point listeners who commented on this…I’m glad so many of you shared my baffled reaction to Nehring and it made up for the fact that I had to sit and listen to her for a whole show…almost.

In a column for The New Republic, she wrote, “Give it a rest. The man didn’t commit murder here. He’s in love. Anarchic, hurtful, but seemingly true love. … For all the fall-out of real passion–and there is always fall-out–it is better to have loved and erred than never to have loved at all.”

Seeing her philosophy applied confirms her idea of romance is indeed as narcissistic as I first suspected, to the point of declaring Mark Sanford, a man who appears to me frightening narcissistic, a mere romantic.

There is a reason calling a person “in love with love” is never offered as a compliment. It usually reveals a person is truly in love with themselves.

Did someone else write this book for Ms. Nehring? Perhaps, she should just spend her next interview reading the book out loud.

I have yet to meet ANYONE in my life (man or woman) who is “embarrassed” by being in love or wanting to be in love. If anything, it’s the reverse. Our modern society values love MUCH more than ever to the point where those who are not in love, or in love with being in love are viewed as abnormal or strange!

Thanks for being such a good sport Ms. Clayson, you saved Tom from an awful interview.

But I fail to see how this is a women’s issue over a human issue. And implicating feminism strikes me as a particularly dastardly and simplistic read of modern history.

But moreover I fail to see how Ms. Nehring’s ideal is very different from the system she critiques. A wild, unrestricted, spontaneous, and irrational “romance” sounds an awful lot like the wild, unrestricted, spontaneous, and irrational sex we’re usually sold.

What I see lacking in all this is a value for love that is long-suffering, patient, and sacrificial. I also feel we tend to under-value friendship and other relationships that are not romantic in nature, assuming they cannot develop the same depth or complexity (in fact, modern films invariably show the best friend as a mere ally in the search for that one true, all-encompassing, romantic relationship.)

At any rate, the book may well be more expansive, but what came across in this interview is a hardly radical image of narcissistic love–with perhaps a bit more historical reference and poetry than most magazine covers.

Fools fall in love and so do some species of parrots.

Oh, I take that back…there really is no point to this person’s “thesus,” intellectual or otherwise.

Actually, I must correct myself again… Ms. Nehring’s inarticulateness was boldly apparent whether she was fumbling for some sort of point or not.

Rather than a well presented topic with value, I would characterize this stammering series of inarticulate kvetchings as a world class case of cluelessness, combined with uninteresting navel gazing of the sort mostly found scrawled about in horrid, unoriginal papers written by immature sophomore college girls.

This interview in no way enriched my life, added to my store of knowledge or touched me in an emotional way…and though I am a male, I am an artist and so am stereotypically emotional, passionate and full of love. Therefore, for me to walk away from this wasted hour with all the warmth of a cold fish is unusual.

On Point is a fine show. How it stooped so low as to entertain this person on-air is beyond me. But then, I suppose it is often easy to be fooled by professional publicists.

Let us hope Ms. Nehring and her publicist make their proverbial dime swiftly, so as to allow them both to disappear from the public forum, leaving air for those who can properly contribute to our collective public discourses.

Seems to me that Nehring is either incredibly naive or lives entirely within the confines of a bourgeois bubble. She has fallen for the great Victorian myth of romantic “heroic” love and is surprised that it does not exist now.

Heroic love has, I would wager, only ever existed on a very limited basis. I’m sure Acchiles had passionate love Nehring mourns, but he was a hero. The vast majority of people struggling to put bread on the table have not and do not have the luxury of making the kinds of wild romantic gestures she claims they did or should. The vast majority of people experience a much more prosaic, yet equally valid type of love.