To love is no easy task. An abundance of literature and pop culture warns us of its trickiness, and often, personal experience emphasizes the point. We love, when people are disagreeable and obnoxious; when our feelings are unrequited; and when our affections are diminished, or worse, scorned as criminal. We love, when doing so drags us to the very edges of ourselves, leaving us ragged and wrung out like old cloth. Loving is hard, and perhaps what makes it hardest is its fundamental paradox: that it is also easy, so easy that we struggle to stop, even when we are desperate to do so, and even when it’s in our best interest.

HARD TO LOVE: ESSAYS AND CONFESSIONS by Briallen Hopper Bloomsbury Publishing, 336 pp., $27.00

Throughout the course of her debut essay collection, Hard to Love, Briallen Hopper contemplates this thorny and capacious emotion from the position of someone whose love life defies traditional conceptions of the term: It is nourishing, brimming, but wholly untethered to sexual romance. These essays trace the specifically knotted, yet exuberant experience of living in the world as a single woman, whose intellectual passions both brought her into the fold of the Ivy League and then, for years, entangled her within academia’s particular variety of elite financial and professional precarity. She proudly wears the mantle of “spinster”—“It’s the spinsters who made me,” she proclaims—and ushers us, sometimes dreamily, other times with searing attention, into a personal narrative about her life amid a mutually supportive “found family” and intimate friends.

Although Hard to Love covers diverse territory, Hopper’s primary concern is to understand what it means to be a single woman who has built a life, predominantly, through close friendships with other women. Her history and milieu, we learn, is deeply feminine: She was raised among five siblings, four of them sisters, collectively the “formerly homeschooled children of religious hippies.” Although Hopper lovingly sustains these familial bonds, she moves from the Pacific Northwest, where she was raised, to the East Coast, in search of some distance from her snug but fraught home. After breaking up with her graduate school boyfriend, she stopped actively dating and began to seek out other possibilities for mutual care.

You could read Hard to Love as a tender missive to all the relationships American culture has overlooked and deflated. As Hopper contemplates the circumstances of her spinster life—among them fraught cohabitation, seeking out a sperm donor (see the incisive and metaphorically hilarious essay “Moby-Dick”), and assembling a care team for a friend with stage four cancer—she foregrounds a claim that ought to be obvious. Platonic love, and the arrangements that grow from it, are not lesser or more juvenile approximations of romantic love and marriage, nor are they stopovers on the journey toward matrimony. They do not belie failure or lack of fulfillment, and they are not the consolation prizes of a lonely someone making do with the best options available to her.

Hopper’s book is also an argument for a social shift. Friendship is a choice, one that is often adventurous in and of itself and should command the same privileges and respect as any other domestic arrangement. It is enough if we want it to be. By naming and advocating for her own rights as an uncoupled woman, Hopper calls for recognition for relationships that are not institutionally sanctioned. She is not interested in divesting married couples of their bevy of privileges, nor does she believe in diminishing these relationships as less precious or meaningful—after all, as a graduate of divinity school and a preacher, she officiates quite a few weddings. Rather, she envisions elevating all intimate bonds, including those between single people, and allotting protections and services to those who need them, rather than reserving them as benefits for those who possess the proper paperwork. No one is more entitled than others to a safeguarded life merely because of marital status.