Susan Sontag on Relationships: When Understanding Replaces Connection (opens in new tab)

Let’s begin where this becomes inconvenient. Susan Sontag did not write a clean theory of marriage. She did something more disruptive. She challenged the modern obsession with understanding experience at the expense of living it. Sontag was one of the 20th century’s most incisive cultural critics, preoccupied not with what people felt—but with how they experienced and interpreted those feelings. She didn’t offer guidance. She exposed distortions. And she was particularly suspicious of a cultu...