A new kind of loving?

Press, 31 May 1980, Page 17

A new kind of loving?

In the Name of Love. By Jill Tweedie. Jonathan Cape, 1979. 196 pp. 515.50. (Reviewed by Leone Stewart)

Love is Jill Tweedie’s idea -of a bad joke. That is, the romantic, weak-at-the-knees, lost-you'r-sense-of-reason kind of love. She puts her case for a new kind of loving. The author envisages a new love stemming from the head and not the heart, based on reason, not romance. Passion is the opposite of love, she argues. JFreed .from the shackles of the search for the knight in shining armour, Women could be a force for peace. It is the women of this world, she maintains, who seek co-operation, who enjoy, sharing. Jill Tweedie sees her new love as a merging of- tribalism and r individualism.. She. puts. much, emphasis on women working, on -financial independence as the saviour of love. Real joy, she writes, is when yoiir'/ lover is with you because- he or she wants to be there. “Needing, is different, surely, from- • using.?’; She:, quotes Kurt Vonnegut, in “‘Slapstick of Lonesome No More,” saying it all for her: “Please —a little less love, and a little more common, decency.”. .

In Jill Tweedie’s book truth is essential to love. The female dependence so often the basis of romantic love, she insists, puts honesty in jeopardy.

A respected English journalist. Jill Tweedie provides an account of her own experiences of being in love. Now happily married, she recounts her past with appealing self-deprecation. _ She definitely’ disapproves of what fellow feminist author, Nancy Friday, calls the “great swept-away phenomenon.” In fact, her tales of love' through the ages, and what was - done in its name, makes one wonder why we ever fell for it. Best known for her thoughtprovoking column in the “Guardian,? Jill Tweedie has done her homework for this book. But for this reviewer, her writing in tight, encapsuled newspaper form is more persuasive, May she see the fruits, of her new love based on rationality. Some may argue that being guided by' the heart rather than the head is - woman’s greatest virtue. Still,-1 have to agree with'the sometimes acerbic Ms Tweedie’s proposition that love may make the world go around, but. it’s not all tt?re is to. life. : ......