Can Love Last Forever?

When Flora Schnall, first met F.M. Esfandiary he was still known as a kafkaesque Iranian novelist. But FM was on the brink of reinventing himself as a radical futurist. Their long romance paired a pioneering lawyer - one of the first women to break the glass ceilings of the existing world - with a 'transhuman' who envisioned the hierarchies of the present completely giving way to new values and new ways of life.

Flora Schnall had proven herself in a world that was both fiercely competitive and deeply connected to some of the world's most renowned, long-running institutions. As one of the early female students at Harvard Law School, she and (future Supreme Court Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been challenged by the law school's dean, demanding to know why these women were insisting on "taking a man's place." The future Supreme Court Justice gave the dean a thoughtful and measured reply, articulating the ways in which she was just as qualified to be a lawyer as any man. Flora simply quipped that she was there just to find herself a great husband.

FM-2030, on the other hand, developed the view that both competition, marriage, and indeed, most of the customs and institutions of the world, had no value in the future that was developing. He believed that exclusive relationships and especially marriage were soon to be things of the past, that relationships of the future were destined to be fluid, ever changing. In a world where lives did not end, "Until Death Do Us Part" was to have no meaning. 

Iconoclasts in very different ways, Flora and FM created an odd couple . Despite the lack of an exclusive or even official commitment to one another, (FM even preferring the world "friend" to "relationship") Flora and FM's connection proved to be lifelong, lasting until FM's suspension in 2000. If one accepts FM's optimistic view of technology, perhaps their friendship is simply on pause, or just beginning.