Over at the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman explores how men and women authors write about marriage. Citing examples from Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, and many others, Waldman writes:
Ideas about love, about its essential nature and its causes, are highly idiosyncratic and often unstable. And yet, among the endless variations, romantic ideation does seem to lean to one or the other of two poles: the notion of love as a profound, mysterious attraction, or the idea of it as a partnership with a like soul, a person uniquely capable of understanding one’s inner life.
