Why Love Hurts E-Book

Eva Illouz

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 599

Beschreibung

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

1: Introduction: The Misery of Love

What is Modernity?

Love in Modernity, Love as Modernity

Why Sociology Is and Remains Necessary

Sociology and Psychic Suffering

2: The Great Transformation of Love or the Emergence of Marriage Markets

Character and the Moral Ecology of Romantic Choice

The Great Transformation of Romantic Ecology: The Emergence of Marriage Markets

Conclusion

3: Commitment Phobia and the New Architecture of Romantic Choice

From Female Reserve to Male Detachment

Masculinity and the Demise of Commitment

The Dynamic of Women's Exclusivist Strategies

Hedonic Commitment Phobia

Aboulic Commitment Phobia

The New Architecture of Romantic Choice or the Disorganization of the Will

Promise-Keeping and the Architecture of Modern Choice

Sexual Abundance and Emotional Inequalities

Conclusion

4: The Demand for Recognition: Love and the Vulnerability of the Self

Why Love Feels Good

From Class Recognition to Recognition of the Self

Recognition and Ontological Insecurity in Modernity

Recognition vs Autonomy

From Self-Love to Self-Blame

The Moral Structure of Self-Blame

Conclusion

5: Love, Reason, Irony

Enchanted Love

Making Love into a Science

Political Emancipation as Rationalization

Technologies of Choice

Eros, Irony

Conclusion

6: From Romantic Fantasy to Disappointment

Imagination, Love

Fictional Emotions

Disappointment as a Cultural Practice

Imagination and the Internet

Autotelic Desire

Conclusion

7: Epilogue

Index

Copyright © Eva Illouz 2012

The right of Eva Illouz to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7210-6 (mobi)

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Acknowledgments

In more than one way, I started writing this book in my head many years ago, while still an adolescent. It is the product of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of conversations with close friends and strangers that left me perplexed and puzzled by the chaos that pervades contemporary romantic and sexual relationships. Why is it that despite their strength and autonomy, women in the four countries in which I have lived during my adult life (France, the United States, Israel, and Germany) are baffled by the elusiveness of men? Why do men seem to have become a puzzle and an ongoing source of bemusement for women? And did the men and women of the past agonize about love in the same way as modern men and women do? Most of the surrounding culture instructs us to answer these questions by looking for the hidden history of our flawed childhood and to explain the disarray of romantic lives with flawed psyches. This book wants to question this largely unquestioned assumption. It wants to explain why love hurts by highlighting the social, rather than the psychological, context of men's and women's encounters.

This book, then, emerges from the intimacy of many hours of conversation, but it owes much to other, less intimate but no less important, conversations. My first thanks go to the Wissenshaftskolleg zu Berlin, which during the 2007–8 year provided the peace and quiet of a monastery and the intense conversations of an eighteenth-century salon. I thank Dale Bauer, Ute Frevert, Sven Hillerkamp, Axel Honneth, Tom Laqueur, Reinhart Merkel, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Susan Neiman, John Thompson, and Eitan Wilf for engaging me so compellingly in their thoughts, questions, and often brilliant suggestions. Mattan Shachak has been entirely necessary to the process of writing this book; he has made tangible on a daily basis the joy of being the teacher of an outstanding student and research assistant. Ori Schwarz, Dana Kaplan, and Zsuza Berend have read many chapters; their comments have been crucial in helping me significantly improve the book. I thank them for their remarkable intellectual generosity. Nathalie-Myriam Illouz, my sister and a brilliant psychoanalyst, and Beatrice Smedley, my friend and fellow-writer, have endlessly discussed with me the splendor and misery of love. I can only hope to emulate the subtlety of their analyses.

A book is a special kind of commodity: it must be not only produced by expert heads and hands, but also believed in. Polity Press is unique in its dedication to furthering the global circulation of ideas, and in its intimate, intense care in the process of producing a book. I am privileged to have seen this book endorsed so wholeheartedly by John Thompson. The depth of his care and the precision of his responsiveness make him an exceptional publisher. Justin Dyer has been a superb editor, and Jennifer Jahn and Clare Ansell have been most responsive and helpful as editorial assistant and production editor, respectively.

I thank all the people, close friends and strangers, who confided in me and told me their stories, sometimes in despair, often in hope and trust. I dedicate this book to the men and the women I will keep loving for a long time, painlessly and painfully.

The publishers would like to acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce the epigraphs:

From INDIGNATION by Philip Roth. Copyright (c) 2008, Philip Roth, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited;

Chris Carter, www.catchhimandkeephim.com;

From DISGRACE by J.M. Coetzee, copyright (c) 1999 by J. M. Coetzee. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and of Vintage, a division of Random House;

From LOVE, ETC. by Julian Barnes, copyright (c) 2000 by Julian Barnes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; published by Vintage Books. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd;

I want my works to be read by the far-from-frigid virginOn fire for her sweetheart, by the boy,In love for the very first time. May some fellow-suffererPerusing my anatomy of a desire,See his own passion reflected there, cry in amazement:Who told this scribbler about my private affairs?

Ovid, Amores

1

Introduction

The Misery of Love

But Bliss in love is seldom the case: For every successful contemporary love experience, for every short period of enrichment, there are ten destructive love experiences, post-love “downs” of much longer duration – often resulting in the destruction of the individual, or at least an emotional cynicism that makes it difficult or impossible ever to love again. Why should this be so, if it is not actually inherent in the love process itself?

Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution1

Wuthering Heights (1847) belongs to a long literary tradition portraying love as an agonizingly painful emotion.2 The novel's notorious protagonists, Heathcliff and Catherine, develop a strong love for each other while growing up together, yet Catherine decides to marry Edgar Linton, a socially more appropriate match. Humiliated when he accidentally overhears Catherine claim that she would degrade herself in marrying him, Heathcliff runs away. Catherine looks for him in the fields, and when she does not find him, she falls ill to the point of near-death.

In a far more ironic mode, Madame Bovary (1856) describes the unhappy marriage of a romantic woman with a kind-hearted but mediocre provincial doctor, who cannot satisfy his wife's sappily romantic and social fantasies. Its eponymous protagonist thinks she has found the hero she has so frequently read and dreamed about in the figure of Rodolphe Boulanger, a dashing landowner. After a three-year-long affair, they decide to elope. On the fateful day, Emma receives Rodolphe's letter breaking off his promise. Here the narrator dispenses with his usual irony when describing the romantic feelings of his heroine, instead describing her suffering with compassion:

She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself, “Come! come!”3

By our own standards, Catherine and Emma's pain seems extreme, but it is still intelligible to us. Yet, as this book seeks to claim, the romantic agony that both of these women experience has changed its content, color, and texture. First of all, the opposition between society and love which each enacts in her suffering is hardly relevant to modern societies. Indeed, there would be few economic obstacles or normative prohibitions preventing either Catherine or Emma from making their love their first and only choice. If anything, our contemporary sense of appropriateness would command us to follow the dictates of our heart, not of our social milieu. Second, a battery of experts would now be likely to come to the rescue of a hesitant Catherine and of Emma's passionless marriage: psychological counseling, couple therapy, divorce lawyers, mediation specialists, would massively appropriate and adjudicate over the private dilemmas of prospective or bored wives. In the absence of (or in conjunction with) experts' help, their modern counterparts would have shared the secret of their love with others, most likely female friends, or, at the very least, occasional anonymous friends found on the Internet, thus considerably diminishing the solitude of their passion. Between their desire and their despair, there would have been a thick flow of words, self-analysis, and friendly or expert advice. A contemporary Catherine or Emma would have spent a great deal of time reflecting and talking about their pain and likely found its causes in their own (or their lovers') deficient childhood. They would have derived a sense of glory not from the experience of grief, but precisely from having overcome it, through an arsenal of self-help therapeutic techniques. Modern romantic pain generates an almost endless gloss, the purpose of which is both to understand and extirpate its causes. Dying, committing suicide, and running away to a cloister no longer belong to our cultural repertoires. This is not to say, obviously, that we, “post-” or “late” moderns, do not know something about the agony of love. In fact we may possibly know more about it than our predecessors. But what it does suggest is that the social organization of romantic pain has changed profoundly. This book is about understanding the nature of that transformation through an examination of the changes undergone in three different and crucial aspects of the self: the will (how we want something), recognition (what matters for our sense of worth), and desire (what we long for and how we long for it).

In fact, few people living in the contemporary era have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. These agonies come in many shapes: kissing too many frogs on the way to Prince/ss Charming; engaging in sisyphean Internet searches; coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates. When relationships do get formed, agonies do not fade away, as one may feel bored, anxious, or angry in them; have painful arguments and conflicts; or, finally, go through the confusion, self-doubts, and depression of break-ups or divorces. These are only some of the ways in which the search for love is an agonizingly difficult experience from which few modern men and women have been spared. If the sociologist could hear the voices of men and women searching for love, s/he would hear a long and loud litany of moans and groans.

Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. Countless self-help manuals and workshops profess to help us better manage our romantic lives by making us more aware of the ways in which we unconsciously engineer our own defeats. The Freudian culture in which we are steeped has made the forceful claim that sexual attraction is best explained by our past experiences, and that the love preference is formed in early life in the relationship between the child and its parents. For many, the Freudian assertion that the family designs the pattern of the erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or to sustain love. Undaunted by incoherence, Freudian culture even further claims that whether our partner is opposite or similar to our parents, s/he is a direct reflection of our childhood experiences – themselves the key to explaining our romantic destiny. With the idea of repetition compulsion, Freud went one step further and argued that early experiences of loss, however painful, will be reenacted throughout adult life, as a way to gain mastery over them. This idea had a tremendous impact on the collective view and treatment of romantic misery, suggesting it is a salutary dimension of the process of maturation. More: Freudian culture suggested that, by and large, romantic misery was inevitable and self-inflicted.

Clinical psychology has played a uniquely central role in suggesting (and bestowing scientific legitimacy on) the idea that love and its failures must be explained by the psychic history of the individual, and that, as a result, they are within the purview of her/his control. Although the original Freudian notion of the unconscious aimed at dissolving traditional authorial notions of responsibility, in practice, psychology played a crucial role in relegating the realm of the romantic and the erotic to the individual's private responsibility. Whether psychoanalysis and psychotherapy intended to or not, they have provided a formidable arsenal of techniques to make us the verbose but inescapable bearers of responsibility for our romantic miseries.

Throughout the twentieth century, the idea that romantic misery is self-made was uncannily successful, perhaps because psychology simultaneously offered the consoling promise that it could be undone. Painful experiences of love were a powerful engine activating a host of professionals (psychoanalysts, psychologists, and therapists of all kinds), the publishing industry, television, and numerous other media industries. The extraordinarily successful industry of self-help was made possible against the backdrop of the deep-seated belief that our miseries are tailor-made to our psychic history, that speech and self-knowledge have healing virtues, and that identifying the patterns and sources of our miseries helps us overcome them. The agonies of love now point only to the self, its private history, and its capacity to shape itself.

Precisely because we live in a time where the idea of individual responsibility reigns supreme, the vocation of sociology remains vital. In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of systematic economic exploitation, it is now urgent to claim not that the failures of our private lives are the result of weak psyches, but rather that the vagaries and miseries of our emotional life are shaped by institutional arrangements. The purpose of this book is thus to vastly shift the angle of analysis of what is wrong in contemporary relationships. What is wrong are not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but the set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have come to structure modern selves and identities.

As such, this suggestion is not new. Feminist writers and thinkers have long contested both the popular belief in love as the source of all happiness and the psychological individualist understanding of the miseries of love. Contrary to popular mythology, feminists argue, romantic love is not the source of transcendence, happiness, and self-realization. Rather, it is one of the main causes of the divide between men and women, as well as one of the cultural practices through which women are made to accept (and “love”) their submission to men. For, when in love, men and women continue to perform the deep divisions that characterize their respective identities: in Simone de Beauvoir's famous words, even in love men retain their sovereignty, while women aim to abandon themselves.4 In her controversial The Dialectic of Sex, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Shulamith Firestone went a step further: the source of men's social power and energy is the love women provide for them and continue to provide for men, thus suggesting that love is the cement with which the edifice of male domination has been built.5 Romantic love not only hides class and sex segregation, but in fact makes it possible. In Ti-Grace Atkinson's striking words, romantic love is the “psychological pivot in the persecution of women.”6 The most arresting claim made by feminists is that a struggle for power lies at the core of love and sexuality, and that men have had and continue to have the upper hand in that struggle because there is a convergence between economic and sexual power. Such sexual male power consists in the capacity to define the objects of love and to set up the rules that govern courtship and the expression of romantic sentiments. Ultimately, male power resides in the fact that gender identities and hierarchy are played out and reproduced in the expression and experience of romantic sentiments, and that, conversely, sentiments sustain broader economic and political power differentials.7

But in many ways, it is also this assumption about the primacy of power that constitutes a flaw in what has become the dominant strand of feminist critique of love. In periods where patriarchy was far more powerful than it is today, love played a much less significant role in the subjectivity of men and women. More than that: the cultural prominence of love seems to have been associated with a decline – not an increase – in men's power in the family and with the rise of more egalitarian and symmetrical gender relationships. Moreover, much of feminist theory is premised on the assumption that in love (and other) relationships, power is the primary building block of social relationships. It thus must disregard the vast amount of empirical evidence suggesting that love is no less primary than power, and that it is also a powerful and invisible mover of social relationships. In reducing women's love (and desire to love) to patriarchy, feminist theory often fails to understand the reasons why love holds such a powerful sway on modern women as well as on men and fails to grasp the egalitarian strain contained in the ideology of love, and its capacity to subvert from within patriarchy. Patriarchy certainly plays a central role in explaining the structure of relationships between the sexes and the uncanny fascination which heterosexuality still exerts on them, but it alone cannot explain the extraordinary grip of the love ideal on modern men and women.

This book thus wants to outline a framework in order to identify the institutional causes for romantic misery, but it takes for granted that the experience of love exerts a powerful hold that cannot be simply explained by “false consciousness.”8 This would be to foreclose the question before it is even asked. My claim here is that the reason why love is so central to our happiness and identity is not far from the reason why it is such a difficult aspect of our experience: both have to do with the ways in which self and identity are institutionalized in modernity. If many of us have “a kind of nagging anxiety, or unease” about love and a sense that matters of love make us “troubled, restless, and dissatisfied with ourselves,” to use the words of philosopher Harry Frankfurt,9 it is because love contains, mirrors, and amplifies the “entrapment” of the self in the institutions of modernity,10 institutions, to be sure, shaped by economic and gender relations. As Karl Marx famously put it, “Human beings make their history themselves, but they do not do so voluntarily, not under circumstances of their own choosing, rather under immediately found, given and transmitted circumstances.”11 When we love or sulk, we do so by using resources and in situations that are not of our own making, and it is these resources and situations this book would like to study. Throughout the following pages, my overall argument is that something fundamental about the structure of the romantic self has changed in modernity. Very broadly, this can be described as a change in the structure of our romantic will, what we want and how we come to implement what we want with a sexual partner (chapters 2 and 3); as a change in what makes the self vulnerable, that is, what makes one feel unworthy (chapter 4); and, finally, as a change in the organization of desire, the content of the thoughts and emotions which activate our erotic and romantic desires (chapters 5 and 6). How the will is structured, how recognition is constituted, and how desire is activated constitute the three main lines of analysis of the transformations of love in modernity. Ultimately, my aim is to do to love what Marx did to commodities: to show that it is shaped and produced by concrete social relations; to show that love circulates in a marketplace of unequal competing actors; and to argue that some people command greater capacity to define the terms in which they are loved than others.

The dangers lurking behind such analysis are many. The most obvious one perhaps has to do with the fact that I may have overdrawn the differences separating “us” – moderns – from “them” – premoderns. Undoubtedly, many, if not most, readers will think about their own set of counter-examples questioning the claim made here – that the causes for love pains have to do with modernity. But a few responses to this serious objection may be readily offered. One is that I do not claim that love pain is new, only that some of the ways in which we experience it are. The second response has to do with the ways in which sociologists work: we are less interested in the singular actions and sentiments of individuals than in the structures which organize these actions and sentiments. While the close and distant past may be full of examples seemingly similar to the present condition, they do not point to the large-scale structures that contemporary romantic practices and their suffering point us to. In that sense, then, I hope historians will forgive me for using history less for its thickness, complexity, and movement, than as a background tapestry with fixed motives which help highlight, by contrast, the characteristic features of modernity.

Like other sociologists, I view love as a privileged microcosm through which to understand the processes of modernity, but unlike them, the story I have to tell here is not one of heroic victory of sentiment over reason, and gender equality over gender exploitation, but far more ambiguous.

What is Modernity?

More than any other discipline, sociology was born out of a frantic and anxious questioning about the meaning and consequences of modernity: Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, have all tried to understand the meaning of the transition from the “old” world to the “new.” The “old” was religion, community, order, and stability. The “new” was breath-taking change, secularity, dissolution of community ties, increasing claims to equality, and a nagging uncertainty about identity. Ever since that extraordinary period marking the transition from the mid-nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, sociology has been busy with the same daunting questions: Will the dwindling of religion and community jeopardize social order? Will we be able to live meaningful lives in the absence of sacredness? In particular, Max Weber was troubled by Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's questions: If we are no longer afraid of God, what will make us moral? If we are not engaged in and compelled by sacred, collective, and binding meanings, what will make our lives meaningful? If the individual – rather than God – is at the center of morality, what will become of the “ethic of brotherliness” that had been the driving force of religions?12 In fact, from the outset, the vocation of sociology has been to understand what the meaning of life could be after the demise of religion.

Modernity, most sociologists agreed, offered exhilarating possibilities, but also ominous risks to our ability to live meaningful lives. Even the sociologists who conceded that modernity meant progress over ignorance, chronic poverty, and pervasive subjection still viewed it as an impoverishment of our capacities to tell beautiful stories and to live in richly textured cultures. Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.

Such sobering up is nowhere more apparent than in the realm of love, which for several centuries in the history of Western Europe had been governed by the ideals of chivalry, gallantry, and romanticism. The male ideal of chivalry had one cardinal stipulation: to defend the weak with courage and loyalty. The weakness of women was thus contained in a cultural system in which it was acknowledged and glorified because it transfigured male power and female fraility into lovable qualities, such as “protectiveness” for the one, and “softness” and gentleness for the other. Women's social inferiority could thus be traded for men's absolute devotion in love, which in turn served as the very site of display and exercise of their masculinity, prowess, and honor. More: women's dispossession of economic and political rights was accompanied (and presumably compensated) by the reassurance that in love they were not only protected by men but also superior to them. It is therefore unsurprising that love has been historically so powerfully seductive to women; it promised them the moral status and dignity they were otherwise denied in society and it glorified their social fate: taking care of and loving others, as mothers, wives, and lovers. Thus, historically, love was highly seductive precisely because it concealed as it beautified the deep inequalities at the heart of gender relationships.

High or hyper-modernity – defined in this book narrowly as the period which followed World War I and used throughout as “modernity” – marked a radicalization of the social tendencies inscribed in early modernity, and changed, at times profoundly, the culture of love and the economy of gender identity contained in it. This culture did retain and even amplify the ideal of love as a power that can transcend daily life. Yet, when it put the two political ideals of gender equality and sexual freedom at the center of intimacy, it stripped love of the rituals of deference and the mystical aura in which it had hitherto been shrouded. All that was holy in love became profane, and men were at last forced to face with their sober senses the real conditions of women's lives. It is this profoundly split and dual aspect of love – both as a source of existential transcendence and as a deeply contested site for the performance of gender identity – that characterizes contemporary romantic culture. More specifically: to perform gender identity and gender struggles is to perform the institutional and cultural core dilemmas and ambivalence of modernity, dilemmas that are organized around the key cultural and institutional motives of authenticity, autonomy, equality, freedom, commitment, and self-realization. To study love is not peripheral but central to the study of the core and foundation of modernity.13

Heterosexual romantic love is one of the best sites to take stock of such an ambivalent perspective on modernity because the last four decades have witnessed a radicalization of freedom and equality within the romantic bond as well as a radical split between sexuality and emotionality. Heterosexual romantic love contains the two most important cultural revolutions of the twentieth century: the individualization of lifestyles and the intensification of emotional life projects; and the economization of social relationships, the pervasiveness of economic models to shape the self and its very emotions.14 Sex and sexuality became disentangled from moral norms, and incorporated in individualized lifestyles and life projects, while the capitalist cultural grammar has massively penetrated the realm of heterosexual romantic relationships.

For example, when (heterosexual) love became the constitutive theme of the novel, few noticed that it became tightly intertwined with another theme, no less central to the bourgeois novel and to modernity at large: that of social mobility. As suggested by the two examples of Catherine and Emma discussed earlier, romantic love was almost always inevitably interwoven with the question of social mobility. That is, one of the central questions asked by the novel (and later by Hollywood cinema) was and remains whether and under what conditions love can trump social mobility, and, vice versa, whether socio-economic compatibility should be a necessary condition for love. The shaping of the modern individual was at one and the same time emotional and economic, romantic and rational. This is because the centrality of love in marriage (and in the novel) coincided with the waning of marriage as a tool of family alliances and marked the new role of love for social mobility. But far from marking the demise of economic calculus, it in fact deepened it, as women and men would increasingly move up (and down) the social ladder through the social alchemy of love. Because love made the fit between marriage and strategies of economic and social reproduction less explicit and formal, the modern choice of a mate progressively included and mixed both emotional and economic aspirations. Love now incorporated and contained rational and strategic interests, merging the economic and emotional dispositions of actors into one single cultural matrix. One of the key cultural transformations accompanying modernity was thus the co-mingling of love with economic strategies of social mobility. This is also why this book contains a number of methodological biases: it addresses heterosexual love more markedly than homosexual love because the former contains a denial of the economic underpinnings of the choice of a love object, and fuses both economic and emotional logics. These two logics are sometimes harmoniously and seamlessly reconciled, but they equally often splinter the romantic sentiment from within. The co-mingling of love and economic calculus at once makes love central to modern lives and is at the heart of the conflicting pressures to which love has been submitted. This intertwining of the emotional and the economic is thus one of the threads through which I offer to reinterpret love in modernity, showing how choice, rationality, interest, competition, have transformed the modes of meeting, seeking, courting a partner, ways of consulting and making decisions about one's sentiments. Another bias of this book is that it addresses the condition of love more markedly from the standpoint of women than of men, and more especially from the standpoint of those women who opt largely for marriage, reproduction, and middle-class lifestyles. As I hope to show here, it is the combination of these aspirations and their location in a free market of sexual encounters which creates new forms of emotional domination of women by men. This means then that although this book is relevant to many women, it is obviously not relevant to all of them (certainly not to lesbians, women who are not interested in domesticity, married or unmarried, or in children).

Love in Modernity, Love as Modernity

The usual suspects explaining the rise of modernity have been scientific knowledge, the printing press, the development of capitalism, secularization, and the influence of democratic ideas. Absent from most accounts is the formation of a reflexive emotional self, one that, as I have argued elsewhere,15 accompanied the making of modernity and defined itself and its identity in primarily emotional terms, centered on the management and affirmation of its feelings. This book would like to situate the cultural ideal and practice of romantic love within the cultural core of modernity, most conspicuously in its decisive importance for the shaping of biography and for the constitution of the emotional self. As Ute Frevert put it, “[E]motions are not only made by history, they also make history.”16

Philosopher Gabriel Motzkin offers a way to start thinking about the role of love in the long process of the formation of the modern individual self. According to him, Christian (Paulinian) faith made the emotions of love and hope both visible and central, thus creating an emotional self (rather than, say, an intellectual or political one).17 Motzkin's argument is that the process of secularization of culture consisted, among other things, in secularizing religious love. Such secularization took two different forms: it made profane love into a sacred sentiment (later celebrated as romantic love), and it made romantic love into an emotion opposed to the restrictions imposed by religion. The secularization of love thus played an important role in the process of emancipation from religious authority.

If one had to give a more precise time frame to these analyses, the Protestant Reformation seems to have been an important stage in the formation of a modern romantic self, for it marked a novel set of tensions between patriarchialism and new emotional expectations regarding the ideal of companionate marriage. “Puritan writers encouraged the formation of new ideals for marital conduct, emphasizing the importance of intimacy and emotional intensity between married couples. Husbands were encouraged to be mindful of their wives' spiritual and psychological welfare.”18

Numerous scholars, historians, and sociologists have argued that love, especially in Protestant cultures, has been a source of gender equality because it was accompanied by a strong valuation of women.19 Through the religious injunction to love tenderly one's spouse, women saw an increase in their status and their ability to make decisions on an equal footing with men. Anthony Giddens and others further suggest that love played a central role in the construction of female autonomy, which had its source in the fact that in the eighteenth century the cultural ideal of romantic love, once severed from religious ethics, enjoined women, no less than men, to choose freely the object of their love.20 In fact, the very idea of love presupposes and constitutes the free will and autonomy of lovers. Motzkin even suggests that “the development of democratic conceptions of authority is a long-range consequence of the presupposition of the emotional autonomy of women.”21 Eighteenth-century sentimental literature and novels further accentuated this cultural tendency because the ideal of love they promoted contributed, in theory and in practice, to unsettle the power which parents – especially fathers – exerted in their daughters' marriages. Thus, the ideal of romantic love was an agent of women's emancipation in one important respect: it was an agent of individualization and autonomy, however circumvoluted such emancipation might have been. Because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the private sphere became highly valued, women could exert what Ann Douglas, using Harriet Beecher Stowe's expression, dubbed “the pink and white tyranny”: that is, the drive of “nineteenth century American women to gain power through the exploitation of their feminine identity.”22 Love put women under the tutelage of men, but it did so by legitimizing a model of the self that was private, domestic, individualistic, and, most of all, that demanded emotional autonomy. Romantic love thus reinforced within the private sphere the moral individualism that had accompanied the rise of the public sphere. In fact, love is the paradigmatic example and the very engine of a new model of sociability dubbed by Giddens as that of the “pure relationship,”23 based on the contractual assumption that two individuals with equal rights unite for emotional and individualistic purposes. It is established by two individuals for its own sake and can be entered and exited at will.

However, while love has played a considerable role in the formation of what historians call “affective individualism,” the story of love in modernity tends to present it as a heroic one, from bondage to freedom. When love triumphs, so this story goes, marriages of convenience and interest disappear, and individualism, autonomy, and freedom are triumphant. Nevertheless, while I agree that romantic love challenged both patriarchy and the family institution, the “pure relationship” also rendered the private sphere more volatile and the romantic consciousness unhappy. What makes love such a chronic source of discomfort, disorientation, and even despair, I argue, can be adequately explained only by sociology and by understanding the cultural and institutional core of modernity. This is also why I believe this analysis to be relevant for most countries involved in the formation of modernity, based on equality, contractualism, integration of men and women in the capitalist market, instutionalized “human rights” as the central core of the person: this transcultural institutional matrix, to be found in many countries worldwide, has disrupted and transformed the traditional economic function of marriage and the traditional modes of regulation of sexual relationships. This matrix enables us to reflect on the highly ambivalent normative character of modernity. While my analysis of love in the conditions of modernity is critical, it is critical from the standpoint of a sobered modernist perspective: that is, a perspective which recognizes that while Western modernity has brought about a vast amount of destruction and misery, its key values (political emancipation, secularism, rationality, individualism, moral pluralism, equality) remain with no superior alternative currently in sight. Yet, endorsing modernity must be a sobered enterprise because this Western cultural form of modernity has brought about its own forms of emotional misery and destruction of traditional life-worlds, has made ontological insecurity a chronic feature of modern lives, and increasingly impinges on the organization of identity and desire.24

Why Sociology Is and Remains Necessary

The grandfather of modern psychology, William James, claimed that the first fact for psychologists to consider is that “thinking of some sort goes on,” and thinking, he said, is personal: every thought is part of a personal consciousness that leads the individual to choose which experiences of the outside world to deal with or reject.25 In contrast, from its inception, the main vocation of sociology has been to debunk the social basis of belief. For sociologists, there is no opposition between the individual and the social, because the contents of thoughts, desires, and inner conflicts have an institutional and collective basis. For example, when a society and culture promote both the intense passion of romantic love and heterosexual marriage as models for adult life, they shape not only our behavior but also our aspirations, hopes, and dreams for happiness. But social models do more: by juxtaposing the ideal of romantic love with the institution of marriage, modern polities embed social contradictions in our aspirations, contradictions which in turn take a psychological life. The institutional organization of marriage (predicated on monogamy, cohabitation, and the pooling of economic resources together in order to increase wealth) precludes the possibility of maintaining romantic love as an intense and all-consuming passion. Such a contradiction forces agents to perform a significant amount of cultural work in order to manage and reconcile the two competing cultural frames.26 This juxtaposition of two cultural frames in turn illustrates how the anger, frustration, and disappointment that often inhere in love and marriage have their basis in social and cultural arrangements. While contradictions are an inevitable part of culture, and while people typically move effortlessly in-between them, some are more difficult to manage than others. When contradictions touch upon the very possibility to articulate experience, their smooth integration in everyday life is less easy.

That individuals vary in their interpretations of the same experiences, or that we live social experiences mostly through psychological categories, does not entail that these experiences are private and singular. An experience is always contained and organized by institutions (a sick person in a hospital; an unruly teenager in a school; an angry woman in a family, etc.); and experiences have shapes, intensities, textures, which emanate from the way in which institutions structure emotional life. For example, much of the anger or disappointment in marriage has to do with the way in which marriage structures gender relations and mixes institutional and emotional logics: say, a desire for genderless fusion and equality, and the distance that inevitably emanates from the performance of gender roles. Finally, to be intelligible to oneself and to others, an experience must follow established cultural patterns. A sick person may explain his disease as God's punishment for his past misdeeds, as a biological accident, or as caused by an unconscious death wish; all of these interpretations emerge from and are situated within elaborate explanatory models used and recognizable by historically situated groups of people.

This is not to say that I deny the idea that there are important psychic differences between people, or that these differences do not play an important role in determining our lives. Rather, my objection to the current dominant psychological ethos is three-fold: that what we take to be individual aspiration and experience have in fact much social and collective content to them; that psychic differences are often – though not always – nothing but differences in social positions and social aspirations; and, finally, that the impact of modernity on the formation of the self and identity is precisely to lay bare individuals' psychic attributes and to grant them a crucial role in determining their destinies, both romantic and social. The fact we are psychological entities – that is, that our psychology has so much influence on our destiny – is itself a sociological fact. In diminishing the moral resources and the set of social constraints which shaped individuals' maneuvering within their social environment, the structure of modernity exposes individuals to their own psychic structure, thus making the psyche both vulnerable and highly operative in social destinies. The vulnerability of the self in modernity can thus be summarized as follows: powerful institutional constraints shape our experiences, yet individuals cope with them with the psychic resources they have amassed in the course of their social trajectory. It is this dual aspect of modern social experiences – ensconced between the institutional and the psychic – that I wish to document in reference to love and love sufferings.

Sociology and Psychic Suffering

From its inception, sociology's main object of study has been collective forms of suffering: inequality, poverty, discrimination, diseases, political oppression, large-scale armed conflicts, and natural disasters have been the main prism through which it has explored the agonies of the human condition. Sociology has been very successful in analyzing these collective forms of suffering, yet has neglected the analysis of the ordinary psychic suffering that inheres in social relationships: resentment, humiliation, and unreciprocated desire are only a few among the many examples of its daily and invisible forms. The discipline has been reluctant to include within its purview emotional suffering – rightly viewed as the mainstay of clinical psychology – lest it be dragged into the murky waters of an individualist and psychic model of society. But if sociology is to remain relevant to modern societies, it must imperatively explore the emotions that reflect the vulnerability of the self in conditions of late modernity, a vulnerability that is at once institutional and emotional. This book contends that love is one such emotion and that a careful analysis of the experiences it generates will take us back to the primary and still much needed and acutely relevant vocation of sociology.

The notion of “social suffering” may seem a welcome means of thinking about the modernity of love suffering. Yet, such a notion is not very useful for my purposes because, as anthropologists understand it, social suffering designates the large-scale visible consequences of famine, poverty, violence, or natural disasters,27 thus omitting the less visible and less tangible forms of suffering such as anxiety, feelings of worthlessness, or depression, all embedded in ordinary life and ordinary relationships.

Psychic suffering has two cardinal features. First, as Schopenhauer has suggested, suffering derives from the fact that we live through “memory and anticipation.”28 In other words, suffering is mediated through imagination: the images and ideals that make up our memories, expectations, and longings.29 A more sociological way of saying this is to suggest that suffering is mediated by cultural definitions of selfhood. Second, suffering is characteristically accompanied by a breach in our capacity for sense-making. As a result, Paul Ricoeur says, suffering often takes the form of a lamentation about its blindness and arbitrariness.30 Because suffering is the irruption of the irrational within everyday life, it demands a rational explanation, an account about desert.31 In other words, an experience of suffering will be all the more intolerable to the extent that it cannot be made sense of. When suffering cannot be explained, we suffer doubly: from the pain we experience and from our incapacity to bestow meaning on it. Thus any experience of suffering always points us to the systems of explanation that are deployed to account for it. And systems of explanation of suffering differ in the ways in which they make sense of pain. They differ in the ways they allocate responsibility, in the aspects of the experience of suffering they address and stress, and in the ways in which they convert (or not) suffering into another category of experience, be it “redemption,” “maturation,” “growth,” or “wisdom.” I would add that modern psychic suffering, while it may involve a range of responses, physiological and psychological, is characterized by the fact that the self – its definition and sense of worth – is directly at stake. Psychic suffering contains an experience which threatens the integrity of the self. Suffering in contemporary intimate interpersonal relationships reflects the situation of the self in conditions of modernity. Romantic suffering is not parenthetical to presumably more serious forms of suffering because, as I hope to show, it displays and performs the dilemmas and forms of powerlessness of the self in modernity. As I document by analyzing a variety of sources (in-depth interviews, Internet sites, the New York Times' “Modern Love” column, the Independent's sex column, novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, self-help books to dating, love, and romance)32 experiences of abandonment and unreciprocated love are as crucial to one's life narrative as other (political or economic) forms of social humiliation.

Skeptics could rightly claim that poets and philosophers have long been aware of the devastating effects of love and that suffering has been and is still one of the main tropes of love, culminating in the Romantic movement, in which love and suffering mutually reflected and defined each other. Yet, this book claims there is something qualitatively new in the modern experience of suffering generated by love. What is properly modern in modern romantic suffering are: the de-regulation of marriage markets (chapter 2); the transformation of the architecture of choice of a mate (chapter 3); the overwhelming importance of love for the constitution of a social sense of worth (chapter 4); the rationalization of passion (chapter 5); and the ways in which the romantic imagination is deployed (chapter 6). But if this book is then about understanding what in romantic suffering is properly new and modern, it does not aim to cover exhaustively the many forms which romantic agony takes, but only some of them; nor does it exclude the fact that many live happy love lives. The claim made here is that both romantic misery and happiness have a specific modern form, and it is to this form that this book wants to pay attention.

Notes

1 S. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Bantam, 1970), p. 129.

2 E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1847]).

3 G. Flaubert, Madame Bovary (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1996 [1857]), p. 145.

4 S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1970 [1949]).

5 See note 1.

6 T.-G. Atkinson, “Radical Feminism and Love” (1974), in Susan Ostrov Weisser (ed.), Women and Romance: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 138–42.

7 C.A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); A. Rich “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs, 5(4) (1980), 631–60; S. Schecter, “Towards an Analysis of the Persistence of Violence against Women in the Home,” Aegis: Magazine on Ending Violence againstWomen (July/August 1979), p. 47; S. Schecter, Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement (New York: South End Press, 1983).

8 See A. Swidler, Talk of Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) for an excellent answer to that question.

9 H. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 5.

10 E. Chowers, The Modern Self in the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

11 Quoted and translated in P. Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994), p. xiii.

12 M. Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in H.H. Gerth and C.W. Milles (eds and trans), From Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1970 [1948]), pp. 323–59.

13 This is also the theoretical and sociological perspective of various sociologists such as Giddens, Beck and Gernsheim-Beck, and Bauman.

14 See R. Bellah, W. Sullivan, A. Swidler, and S. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

15 E. Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions and the Culture of Self-Help, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

16 U. Frevert, “Was haben Gefühle in der Geschichte zu suchen?” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 35 (2009), pp. 183–208 (p. 202).

17 G. Motzkin, “Secularization, Knowledge and Authority,” in G. Motzkin and Y. Fischer (eds), Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe (Jerusalem: Alliance Publishing Trust, 2008), pp. 35–53.

18 M. Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 98.

19 F. Cancian, Love in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); A. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

20 Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy.

21 Motzkin, “Secularization, Knowledge and Authority,” p. 43.

22 A. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 6–7.

23 A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 70–108; Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, pp. 49–64.

24 See R. Girard, Le Sacrifice (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2003); R. Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

25 W. James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (New York: Cosimo, 2007 [1890]), p. 224.

26 See Swidler, Talk of Love.

27 A. Kleinman, V. Dass, and M. Lock (eds) Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

28 A. Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 44.

29 For example, one may speculate that egalitarian cultures with an egalitarian cultural imaginary and a mobile social structure generate more psychic suffering than caste societies, in which individuals develop few or fewer expectations.

30 I. Wilkinson, Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 43.

31 In religion, this has been the main function of religious theodicy, which explains why people suffer, and, more crucially, why it is right that they suffer. In the realm of romance, clinical psychology has occupied the function of theodicy, explaining why we suffer, thus making it not only intelligible but acceptable as well.

32 My data are varied and include 70 interviews with people living in three large urban centers in Europe, the US, and Israel; a wide variety of web-based support groups; nineteenth-century and contemporary novels; a large sample of contemporary guidebooks to romance, dating, marriage, and divorce; Internet dating sites; and, finally, an analysis of the New York Times weekly column “Modern Love” for a period of two years. The interviewees comprised 60% women and 40% men, and because the interviewer needed to be trusted, I used a snowball procedure. All interviewees were college graduates and their ages ranged from 25 to 67. The sample included single people never married, single people who had been divorced, and married people. Pseudonyms are used for interviewees to protect their anonymity. National differences are not discussed for two reasons: the first is that I found the type of predicaments faced by men and women remarkably similar (in itself a finding); and the second is that if all research implies choices to focus on certain aspects of a phenomenon and to ignore others, my choice was to focus on precisely what united rather than divided the experience of these men and women in different national contexts.

2

The Great Transformation of Love or the Emergence of Marriage Markets

“Why do you not come in person to see me?” Dear one, what would people say? I should have but to cross the courtyard for people to begin noticing us, and asking themselves questions. Gossip and scandal would arise, and there would be read into the affair quite another meaning than the real one. No, little angel, it were better I should see you tomorrow at Vespers.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk1

[I]t was 1951 […]. What girl found a boy “desirable” at Winesburg College? I for one had never heard of such feelings existing among the girls of Winesburg or Newark or anywhere else. As far as I knew, girls didn't get fired up with desire like that; they got fired up by limits, by prohibitions, by outright taboos, all of which helped to serve what was, after all, the overriding ambition of most of the coeds who were my contemporaries at Winesburg: to reestablish with a reliable young wage earner the very sort of family life from which they had temporarily been separated by this attending college, and to do so as rapidly as possible.

Philip Roth, Indignation2

Love has long been portrayed as an experience that overwhelms and bypasses the will, as an irresistible force beyond one's control. Yet, in this and the next chapter I make a counter-intuitive claim: one of the most fruitful ways to understand the transformation of love in modernity is through the category of choice. This is not only because to love is to single out one person among other possibilities and thus to constitute one's individuality in the very act of choosing a love object, but also because to love someone is to be confronted with questions of choice: “Is s/he the right one?” “How do I know this person is right for me?” “Won't there be a better person along the way?” These questions pertain both to sentiments and to choice, as a differentiated type of action. To the extent that modern selves are defined by their claim to exercise choice – most glaringly in the two realms of consumption and politics – love can give us important insights into the social basis of choice in modernity.

Choice is the defining cultural hallmark of modernity because, at least in the economic and political arenas, it embodies the exercise not only of freedom, but also of two faculties that justify the exercise of freedom, namely rationality and autonomy. In this sense, choice is one of the most powerful cultural and institutional vectors shaping modern selfhood; it is both a right and a form of competence. If choice is intrinsic to modern individuality, how and why people choose – or not – to enter a relationship is crucial to understanding love as an experience of modernity.

Economists, psychologists, and even sociologists tend to think of choice as a natural feature of the exercise of rationality, a kind of fixed, invariant property of the mind, defined as the capacity to rate preferences, to act consistently based on these hierarchized preferences, and to make choices by using the most efficient means. Yet, choice is far from being a simple category and is no less shaped by culture than are other features of action. To the extent that choice implies a hierarchy between rational thought and emotions – and among the kind of rational thoughts and emotions which can impel a choice – and to the extent that it presupposes the very capacity for choice, and cognitive mechanisms to organize the process of choice, we may say that it is culturally and socially shaped, a simultaneous property of the environment and of the person's thoughts and beliefs about choice.3

One of the main transformations undergone by love in modernity has to do with the very conditions within which romantic choices are made. These conditions are of two kinds. One concerns the ecology of choice, or the social environment that compels one to make choices in a certain direction. For example, endogamic rules are a very good example of how choice might be constrained within and by a social environment, excluding as potential partners members of the same family or members of different racial or ethnic groups. Alternatively, the sexual revolution transformed the ecology of sexual choice in removing a considerable number of prohibitions on the choice of a sexual partner. The ecology of choice might be the outcome either of an intended and consciously designed policy4 or of unplanned social dynamics and processes.

But choice has another aspect as well, which I suggest calling the architecture of choice.5 Architecture of choice has to do with mechanisms that are internal to the subject and shaped by culture: they concern both the criteria with which one evaluates an object (piece of art, toothpaste, prospective spouse), and the modes of self-consultation, the ways in which a person consults his or her emotions, knowledge, and formal reasoning to reach a decision. The architecture of choice consists in a number of cognitive and emotional processes, and, more especially, it has to do with the ways in which emotional and rational forms of thinking are valued, conceived of, and monitored in making a decision. A choice can be the outcome of an elaborate process of self-consultation and exposition of alternative courses, or of an “instantaneous” snap decision, but each of these routes has specific cultural pathways, which remain to be elucidated.

Six cultural components of the architecture of choice are most salient. First, does choice include thought about the remote consequences of one's decisions,6 and if yes, which consequences are thought about and imagined? For example, the increased rate of divorce is likely to have introduced a new perception of the consequences of marriage in the decision to marry. Aversion of risk and anticipation of regret can in turn become culturally salient features of some decisions (e.g., marriage), thereby transforming the process of choice. Conversely, some decisions can be made with or without thinking about the remote consequences of one's actions (e.g., Wall Street's financial wizards before the 2008 crisis probably became far more aware of the perceptions of the consequences of their own choices after the financial collapse). Whether consequences are foregrounded in the process of making the decision, and with what consequences, is thus culturally variable.