Why Love Hurts

A Sociological Explanation

Eva Illouz

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745671079, 9780745661520
• eBook ISBN: 9780745672113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction: The Misery of Love
• 2: The Great Transformation of Love or the Emergence of Marriage Markets
• 3: Commitment Phobia and the New Architecture of Romantic Choice
• 4: The Demand for Recognition: Love and the Vulnerability of the Self
• 5: Love, Reason, Irony
• 6: From Romantic Fantasy to Disappointment
• 7: Epilogue
• Index