Abstract
Eva Illouz describes romantic love as the “cultural core of modernity”; a means of measuring our self-worth, an “anchor for recognition, the perception and constitution of one’s worth … the central link—in the long chain of interaction rituals” (p. 120). The problem is, however, the search for love is littered with “a long and loud litany of moans and groans” (p. 3). In Why Love Hurts Illouz wants to provide a sociological explanation to this question. She argues that throughout the twentieth century romantic misery has been framed as a psychological discourse and therefore as a “disorganization” of the body and of the mind, attributable to a flawed and weak self. The goal of the book then is to “shift the angle of analysis” from “dysfunctional childhoods” or “insufficiently aware psyches,” to the way that society and culture have come to “structure modern selves and identities” (p. 4). Taking this approach, Illouz organizes her argument around a number of key structures to examine the causes of romantic misery in late modernity.
One source of romantic pain is the contemporary marriage market (Chapter Two). Unlike marriage in other epochs and in other traditions, ours (Western capitalist societies) is a “self-regulated market of encounters” (p. 41) where the competition has become more intense and more generalized, and where choice is, at least outwardly, governed by subjective factors such as personal taste, physical attractiveness and personality. How well one does on the marriage market is therefore linked to how well one does on the sexual market.
Both the marriage and the sexual market play out differently for men and women, and more generally disadvantage women in a number of ways. Possibly the most important of these is the way in which commitment is sought and interpreted. Marriage and family are less sought after because they are no longer sites of male control and domination (p. 75). Instead men compete and assert their status by how well they succeed in the sexual market (p. 73). As such, men want to stay in the sexual market for as long as possible. For women however, their time in the sexual market is shorter: they enter it later because of career goals and leave it earlier because of the prevalence of sexiness and other strict criteria of beauty closely tied to age, and biological factors affecting reproduction (pp. 76–78).
Women are also disadvantaged in love by the way in which recognition and commitment get trumped by autonomy (Chapter Four). In modernity, autonomy is a goal for both men and women. Illouz argues however, that men, have not only “internalized” the discourse of autonomy, but can practice it more readily and for a longer period of time (p. 136). These differences are also played out in the phenomenon of commitment phobia (Chapter Three). While nineteenth century masculinity was defined in terms of the capacity to feel strong emotions and keep promises, the central motif of twenty-first century relationships is that men are emotionally elusive and routinely resist long-term relationships (p. 64).
Illouz’s analysis here resonates with some of the feminist critique of love. Early feminists such as Firestone and deBeauvoir described love as the pivot of oppression for women, as a hell and a holocaust (Firestone 1970); a curse which confined women to a sterile hell (de Beauvoir 1953). But Illouz is also a critic of the feminist argument against love. It does not add up, she argues, with the fact that the period of history when women have been more equal to men coincides directly with the period of history where love has dominated relationships between the sexes. In denying this, feminist theory often denies the egalitarianism of love, and its capacity to subvert patriarchy (p. 5). In fact it could actually be argued that it is the egalitarianism of romantic love which has made it the popular and enduring idea it has become. Philosopher Robert Solomon asserted that romantic love not only requires, but also creates, equals and as such is a tool of empowerment for women. Social theorist Anthony Giddens—in his ideas of the “pure relationship,” “confluent love” and “plastic sexuality” (1992)—claims that modern romantic love has the potential to liberate not only women from patriarchy but also same-sex love from heteronormativity. There is some empirical evidence to sustain this argument: Radway (1991), Pearce and Stacey (1995), and Langhamer (2007), among others, have shown how women use love exactly to achieve what Solomon and Giddens have argued: that it is a means to break free from entrenched social and gender conventions, and a means by which women can subvert patriarchy.
Illouz’s goal of snatching back the discourse of love from psychology can be assisted by two other books published at around the same time situated in the discipline of philosophy: Pascal Bruckner’s The Paradox of Love and Simon May’s Love: A History. Both Bruckner and May agree with Illouz that love has reached a dizzy height in modern society. Bruckner describes love as the “general ideology of the West” (p. 208), and May as its “undeclared religion, the ultimate source of meaning and happiness” (p. 1).
May claims that love is “overloaded” (p. 239) full of vain and unrealistic expectations (p. 13). Because of its prominence it becomes “a means to love, rather than love a means to the beloved” (p. 170) and this can lead to inhumanity. Furthermore if love has the power to create psychological rootedness in us, it simultaneously has the power of destruction over us. We fear it because we know that love is capable of injustice, cruelty and abandonment (p. 255).
Pascal Bruckner thinks we expect too much from love, but the problem for him is that we do not properly understand it. As his title says, love is a paradox, it is inconsistent (p. 179), ambiguous (p. 218), both “noble and base” (p. 5), “simultaneously exquisite and painful” (p. 218), and yet we expect it to deliver the happiness without the pain. This is neither achievable nor desirable. The pain we incur as a result of loving and being loved is part of the experience, we are pleased by it, and would miss it if it was not there. If we eliminate the ambiguity we “kill the enchantment” (p. 218). As such, Bruckner urges us to resist the temptation to bring love into the realm of ethics and reason: “There is progress in the condition of men and women, there is perfectibility of the individual, there is no progress in love” (p. 219).
These three authors all share a positive reading of love, but at least May and Illouz are keen to see some development in the idea. As we have seen, Bruckner and Illouz do not want to do away with romantic pain. However unlike Bruckner, Illouz does want to see the development of alternative models of love that are more ethical, but not necessarily more rational, a place where “masculinity and passionate commitment are not incompatible,” and where “the social experience[s] of women are also clearly reflected” (p. 247). Nor does she want to do away with the fundamentally modern ideas of freedom and autonomy, but rather she wants to contribute to a project where “we can better live these times” (p. 248).
May also wants love to undergo a transformation, or several transformations which together will disengage love from religion and God, return it to earth and humanity, and make it a more realistic and less painful experience. To do this, love needs to shed three of its central illusions: that it is unconditional, eternal, and selfless. All three of these ideas stem from love’s connection with religion and God, they describe the way in which humans were told to love God, but none of them guide humans well in how to love each other. Human love, like everything else human is conditional, it lasts only as long as the lover continues to see that which inspires the love in the first place, and while a lover is “attentive to the reality of the other” this attentiveness is dependent upon the lover’s own “self-possession, self-interest in our flourishing, and so selfhood of the most developed kind” (p. 238).
Love also can be re-conceptualized so that its focus looks both to the past and to the future. Much of our understanding of love is rooted in the idea of a coming together of two people who have long been searching for one another (myth of Aristophanes); of a return to something (Phaedrus’ soul yearns to return to the spiritual source, Augustine’s soul to return to its spiritual origin in God). However love can also be understood as something that evolves into the future: Diotima’s ascent to contemplating beauty, Christianity’s transformation to the divine, Spinoza’s striving for perfection, Rousseau’s journey toward discovering and becoming. “Love therefore looks simultaneously to past and future. Differently put: its spirit is, at once, nostalgic and utopian, conservative and idealistic. To that extent, love is Janus-faced: both a recovery and a discovery” (p. 246). Furthermore the project of widening the meaning of love can also be achieved by re-reading eros, agape and philia as not distinct types of love but rather as modes of “love’s mature attentiveness” (p. 248).
But to what end this re-reading of love? Robert Solomon said that the problem is not love itself but the context in which it is practiced—speaking against the charge that love oppressed women, Solomon argued that it was not love that oppressed women but other societal structures. The same argument can be made now: if love hurts, it is the way that love is practiced that makes it so. That is not however to let love off the hook. Love is a dynamic and dialectical structure and institution. Illouz’s approach is fruitful here because she asks us to question the social structures around love, May is also calling for a reshaping of love to accommodate our demands upon it, however Bruckner seems to be suggesting we should just suck it up! All three caution against the centrality we give love to life’s journey, and this is good advice.
Much more has been said, and remains to be said about love and the way we understand and practice it. We need to be clear about what love is. Too often the discussion of love slips into a discussion of sex and even of marriage. We need to take into account love outside of the heterosexual construct. For example, the same-sex marriage debates that have been raging around the world in the last few decades have brought to the fore the connection between love and marriage, and in turn the connection that love has to biology, nature, procreation, family and sexuality. A cross-cultural study of love may also provide some leads for a different construction of love. These were not questions for these authors—but the books they have written form part of the ongoing study of love and its endless fascination.