Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

In this sortie against the tyranny of couples, University of Toronto English professor Cobb (God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence) musters theoretical perspectives and close readings of literary and cultural texts to probe the psychic “wound” at the base of the romantic relationship. Meditating on the single’s role in a world made for two, he argues that the single’s supposed loneliness is actually a projection of the couple’s “moribund desperation” over its own fragility. The book, perhaps ironically, uses a halved structure, with its first two chapters exploring the problems of the couple, and the final two plotting models of singleness and their strengths. Some of Cobb’s various sources include HBO’s Big Love, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, the film Love Story, Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” the political theories of Hannah Arendt, and his own trek through the Utah desert. Although the book is deliberately provocative, with its evocations of the couple’s “steely, enduring logic” and “toxic emotional restraints,” it’s most helpful to see Cobb’s radical critique not as an ode to unattached monasticism but as suggestions for how the single perspective’s solitude, privacy, and freedom can open up vistas—even in the lives of the happily coupled. (July)