A woman craves the words “I love you” from her man, and the man stubbornly withholds them, for the sake of what he considers his freedom and individuality. What could be more of a cliché, less of an occasion for original philosophical reflection? Yet Women in Love uses this scaffolding to construct its own reinvention of intimacy, its anti-foundational and accommodationist answers to the respective questions What are men and women like? and What should we do about this? Whereas Howards End uses Ruth, Margaret, Leonard, and Tibby as models to examine what types of male and female Soul-material will be viable in the new century, Lawrence's 1920 novel uses its two richly imagined protagonists, Birkin and Ursula, each of whose temperaments is interwoven with his or her philosophy, as vehicles for thinking through the challenges of modern couplehood.

More specifically, Women in Love subjects the middle-class ideal of “companionate marriage” to as broad and deep a critique as it receives in any modernist work. This ideal, defined below, was so widespread in Lawrence's time (as it remains today) that it won the support of thinkers with radically different political and cultural attitudes. And it was (and remains) woven so thoroughly into the fabric of daily life that many couples, suggests the novel, endorse it unconsciously, without realizing the choice they make in doing so.