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1 ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband’   Marriage falls into a specific category of things I don’t want to think about because their meaning swells the more you do Personally, socially, historically And yet, I am always interested in love stories: I listen to my friends talk about their love lives and when they apologise for dwelling on something – ‘is this boring?!’ – I answer, ‘love is the subject’ I am interested in how we organise our lives by connection with other people, in how we live alongside others, in how love is a social construct and a form of relation Love is the subject, by which I mean, love is something we want to narrate and discuss, because words make this inexplicable and incomprehensible thing – other people – feel less ambiguous, perhaps closer to certainty   I don’t mean to conflate marriage and love Quite the opposite – it is marriage’s function as an organising logic that I fear, that I believe does not work for anyone (especially not women) When I speak of marriage, it is not love I think of, but power I think about Phyllis Rose discussing this in the introduction to Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (1983): ‘When we resign power or assume new power, we insist it is not happening and demand to be talked to about love Perhaps that is what love is – the momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power’ But power is impossible to sidestep A page later: ‘Who can resist the thought that love is the ideological bone thrown to women to distract their attention from the powerlessness of their lives?’    Perhaps it is due to this ‘ideological bone’ that I am writing about marriage when what I’m really interested in is love I am not confusing the two as much as recognising what Devorah Baum delineates in the introduction to On Marriage, that ‘marriage is so fundamental to shaping our ideas about what it means to get attached that one