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  • Essay / Laura Kipnis and her definition of adultery and midlife crises

    How does Kipnis reevaluate the meaning of adultery and midlife crises? What kind of evidence does she think these phenomena are? As we all know, love is known to be one of the most powerful and important forces in our own existence. Achieving love has become such an important aspect of our lives that we consider ourselves a failure if we fail to achieve it. Society as a whole has so many romantic expectations when it comes to love that it has almost become so difficult for us in a relationship to meet or sometimes even exceed those expectations. However, this romanticized version of love today was not learned until after the 18th century, according to some historians. In fact, most of what we think of as love came to us through the Romantic era of the 18th century and our fascination with reading novels. This romanticized version created a notion of expectations that were impossible to achieve, but nonetheless expected. Therefore, Kipnis views adultery and midlife crises as a rebellious break from the domestic confinement that these expectations have caused love to become. They became proof of the reality of the sustainability of monogamy and the impact of society's ideology on it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay. Kipnis likes to express the current ideology of love as something unsustainable and impossible to achieve to the extent that it is expected. She argues that the search for love has become such a necessity in today's society that if we ranked the anxieties we had at the top of our own list, there would be diagnoses like "inability to settle down” or “immaturity” (Kipnis). She explains that this was not the case for the Greeks and suggests that this was a learned behavior after the 18th century. Kipnis begins to note that after the 18th century, society "expected that romance and sexual attraction could last a lifetime as a couple, despite much hard evidence to the contrary" (Kipnis). The expectation that love will last a lifetime puts immense pressure on the individual to remain faithful to their partner for a lifetime, which is extremely unrealistic. She then explains that because of this, we "feel like failures when love dies" and when love dies, we "experience [it] as a crisis and an inadequacy, even though such failures are more the norm than waiting” (Kipnis). This causes a lot of anxiety around finding love and how long it will last according to Kipnis, which then leads to higher rates of separation as demands and expectations arise. This has led to love becoming both a "beacon of hope" and later "your worst nightmare" as you struggle to live up to all the expectations that society's love has led you to believe to be true (Kipnis). According to Kipnis, this immense pressure is what leads many people to commit adultery or enter a mid-life crisis because they begin to realize that they cannot meet the expectations of love placed on them. were taught. Additionally, Kipnis views adultery as an escape. for the modern idea of ​​love and its confinements. People who commit adultery are seen as failures and people who should be ashamed of themselves. However, Kipnis explains that these are people who "just want change", "want to start over" or "want more satisfaction than what they have" (Kipnis). For this reason, they are punished and sometimes rejected by society because their expectations of..