Who taught you to love? The inscription welcomed me on the door of a Toronto-based apartment as I returned from giving a presentation on fatherhood and love to a small, yet enthusiastic, audience at the International Sociological Associationās 2018 Conference. The question seemed apt, as it mirrored some of the thoughts I was investigating as part of my research on paternal love: āIs love something we learn or is it an instinct? Why do we gender it? Why is romantic love so socially prominent? And why are other forms of love obscured in the analysis of everyday life?ā You are about to engage with a sociological analysis on love, which attempts to provide some answers to these questions, filtered as they shall appear through the narratives of a specific group of European fathers. Why is it important to explore paternal love in the realm of family relationships? One reason is that, so far, there are no extensive accounts of paternal love in sociology. While accounts of romantic love abound (Illouz 2012; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014; Seebach 2017; Engdahl 2018), paternal love continues to remain curiously absent. Another reason could be a āblanketā effect, whereby lesser-studied European populations such as Scottish and Romanian involved fathers are usually overlooked because, in the first case, Scottish fathers tend to be grouped under the definition of āBritish menā, while accounts of Romanian fatherhood are categorized under the literature termed āEastern-European studiesā. These are reasons for studying specific groups of fathers, as the specificity of their cultural contexts will help the reader see the specificity of other contexts and reconsider assumptions made about āall fathersā or āall fathers of European familiesā. In addition, it is important to conduct micro-level qualitative studies that contradict prevailing mass-cultural stereotypes. Furthermore, large-scale statistical data about family lives and their economic and socio-political conditions are brought to life by everyday accounts of intimate living. For example, the photograph above is an image of my family taken in 1993 on the grounds of a Romanian Christian-Orthodox church in Bucharest. The social occasion was my younger sisterās christening, one of the many cultural and religious rituals that circumscribe the boundaries of Romanian family life. Iām the girl with the Snow-White imprint on her dress, lifted by my father. My father, a 26-year-old man at that time, exhibits, in this image, the typical prerogative of masculine strength expected from Romanian men of his age and social background. Moreover, the picture is, in many respects, the quintessential image of the nuclear/traditional āfamilyā, depicting adherence to the āheteronormā, which is a set of customs and practices that maintain the superiority of heterosexual family relations over any alternative family forms (Wilkinson 2013). The ānuclearā family structure (comprising the mother, the father and their two biological children) belongs to a certain time and place, as modern families are currently undergoing social transformations at a rapid pace, especially in the North-Western part of the globe (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2014; Jamieson 1998). So the picture covers the unsaid as well as the obvious (Kuhn 2002) and stands as a testament of time, reflecting the period of quiet and restructuring after the tumultuous social upheaval experienced by my parents just three years before this photograph was taken, during a revolution that brought about the fall of communism, not only in Romania but in the entire, former Eastern-European block (Shapiro and Shapiro 2004). Not only this picture is about a specific social-political landscape, tradition, culture and the representation of gendered bodies, but it is also about love. The love we shared and continue to do as family members. A love complicated by our combined biographies and multiple intersections (of age, gender and generation) and by our everyday lived experiences as members of a connected group, replete with the ideal images we continue to hold about what it means to be a āfamilyā. This love incorporates power, as it speaks about a form of socialization done according to Romanian cultural and gendered norms and tied into specific cultural family practices.
Contrary to sociologists, psychologists provide significant analyses of familial love, by rather mysteriously refering to love in other terms, such as āwarmthā or āattachmentā (Lamb 2010; Marsiglio and Roy 2012). So why this reluctance to name love by its name in scientific inquiries? One explanation is that because love was considered too amorphous a subject to warrant rational scientific analyses (Jackson 1993), it remained circumscribed to the religious realm (Gucht 1994) or to that of popular entertainment. However, this is no longer the case, and with the simultaneous rise in fatherhood studies, an interest in love studies could also be observed. The present research is unique because it has investigated, from a sociological perspective, the convergences of these two topics.
The data presented in this book was gathered between the winter of 2014 and the summer of 2015. Coincidentally, 2015 also marked the introduction of shared parental leave provisions in the UK, extending for employed fathers the short two weeksā time they could take to look after their children, to a longer three-month period. In Romania, at the moment, fathers can only take 5 days once their baby is born, with the possibility of extending this to 15 days if they attend an infant-care course (Macht and Popescu 2018), while in Scotland, they can take a mere two weeks of paternity leave and the shared leave option, as in the rest of the UK. Nonetheless, this time spent with the baby continues to be far too little compared to the maternal allocation. Mothers in both countries can take a full year or more to take care of the baby since childcare and love continue to be written into social policies as female responsibilities. Even if gender attitudes are changing and there is notable progress in terms of parental leave provisions in both the UK and Romania, it is important to underline that this process continues to happen in āslow motionā (Segal 2007) and that it is not taking place uniformly across Europe.
Reflections on the experience of love come in this book through the perspective of men rather than the voice of all of their family members because as bell hooks wrote more than a decade ago: āmale domination of women and children stands in the way of loveā (p. xxiv, 2004). As such, menās views on how they relate to their children, romantic partners and own parents are the topic of this book because I aimed to empirically address how men as fathers think about love and its meaning in their intimate lives. bell hooks adds that what stands in the way of dismantling patriarchal relations of power and domination towards more positive and nurturing relations is the...