Abstract
Why Love Hurts explores changes in the experiences of love in modernity and in Western countries. More precisely, it investigates the nature of the transformation of romantic pain. Illouz, an expert in investigating the crossroads of emotions, culture, and society, emphasizes the importance of a sociological approach which is also historical in that it examines the transformation of love from pre- to late modernity. She argues that the study of love is fundamental for the study of modernity as a privileged perspective from which one can gain an understanding of the process of modernity. Why Love Hurts examines the causes of love suffering and finds them in the social reorganization of sexuality, in the changes of romantic choice, and in the different sorts of recognition that derive from the love bond and desire. Illouz considers love in the same way that Marx considered commodities: love is shaped by social relations, it circulates in a marketplace where unequal actors compete against each other, and where some people are more powerful than others in their capacity to define how they can love and how they can be loved. She also discusses the role of Freudian culture and clinical psychology in emphasizing the idea that romantic misery belongs in the realm of the individual’s private responsibility: clinical psychology has suggested that love and its failures should be explained in terms of an individual’s psychic history. Hence therapy culture has provided a form of control over individuals through the care of many professionals.
Illouz centers her work on several aspects of ‘what is properly modern in modern romantic suffering.’ First, she identifies the category of choice as the basis of the transformation of love and the emergence of marriage markets from pre- to late modernity. For normative, social, and technological reasons, transformations occurred in the ecology of choice and in the architecture of the choice of a mate. If in modernity choice is a cognized and reflexive category, then the choice of a mate also becomes cognized, but more rational, emotional, and more dependent on tastes. In other words, it is a consequence of complex evaluations. The transition from the premodern to the modern age has also seen the emergence of sexual fields as social arenas where actors compete with each other for the quality and the quantity of partners, and where sexuality is commodified. Men are dominant in the sexual field. They use sexuality as a status and experience sexuality in an emotionally detached way that sometimes becomes so-called ‘commitment phobia’. Thus, women are emotionally dominated by men and involved in an ambivalent and conflictual situation of attachment to and detachment from men. Such inequalities have to do with new modes of recognition: that is, women’s need of love in terms of identity and self-validation. Gender differences are thus reorganized in new ways through the category of choice: in short, love is a source of worth for women and of sexual capital for men. Illouz identifies four main features of the experiences of love: irony, commitment phobia, ambivalence, and disappointment. These factors have destructured will and desire. Desire has changed in intensity and quality, and it is governed by an economy of abundance. The virtual world of the Internet enables vicarious relationships to be formed where desire is stronger. However, desire becomes weak in the real interactions of everyday life. The author argues that biology and psychology have become part of the problem because they are ways to explain and legitimize romantic pain, modes of highlighting the emotional inequalities between the sexes: they highlight the emotional ineptitude of men and the emotional weakness of women. Whilst the cooling of emotions provided by clinical psychology through emotional care and control makes actors less vulnerable in their interactions with each other, it causes the loss of passionate love and emotions.
The author bases her claims on a data set drawn from 70 interviews with people living in large urban centers in the United States, Europe, and Israel (the interviewees were men and women with college degrees), web-based support groups, 19th-century and contemporary novels, contemporary guidebooks to romance, dating, marriage, and divorce, Internet dating sites, and analysis of two years of the weekly column ‘Modern Love’ in The New York Times. Such data make it possible to identify a population belonging to the middle- and upper-middle classes in Western countries. The author’s analysis creates a parallel, through novels and guidebooks, with the love experiences of the 19th-century bourgeoisie and the contemporary upper-middle and middle class. In this way, she also provides a form of triangulation for her data that validates and gives sense to her sociohistorical approach. Thus, the use of letters and novels of the past are analytical tools, not yardsticks, for comparison between two different historical conditions.
One of the book’s main strengths is the author’s explanations of the risks of misunderstanding her claims. One of these explanations concerns the reason why the book neglects some themes and focuses on others. It is an ethical sense that guides the author’s choice to neglect the study of modern forms of happy love and to focus on romantic pain. Likewise, the author takes the perspective of women even if she believes that men suffer as well. Women are the targets of ‘an industry of psychological self-fashioning’ and their emotional inequalities and the frailty of their psyches need help to reorganize passion and commitment in a reflexive way. Illouz defines herself a ‘sobered modernist’ sociologist and, aware of the role played by feminist culture in her formation and approach, she also discusses the limits and consequences of the feminist revolution on female and male experiences of love unease.
As the author emphasizes, the book contains some methodological biases. First, her work mainly focuses on forms of heterosexual love and neglects homosexual bonds. Second, in the field of heterosexual experiences she explores the standpoint of middle-class women who choose marriage and reproduction. The way in which the author has constructed her sample and collected the data reflects her intention to limit her analysis in such terms. She foregoes exploration of the boundary area constituted by new forms of happy and unhappy love of actors such as homosexuals, single women and men, single mothers, and so on, and comparison among such alternative forms of love and bonds. The data also disregard social strata not belonging to the middle and upper-middle class, although the author is aware of the social mobility of modernity and of the mobilization due to the modern forms of love. A couple of questions remain to be explored. The first one is methodological and concerns the extent to which some famous novels analyzed by the author are representative of 19th-century society and may reflect the social mechanisms of choice and love suffering. Probably we ignore, and the author too, novels less well-known but more popular and more representative of that society. Sometimes such novels did not survive into the contemporary age because of their nature. The second question regards the not secondary role of religion in the marriage market and in sexual fields: how do old and new forms of religion affect the love experience, and how are they intertwined with love suffering and economics? Illouz discusses some aspects of Christianity and Protestantism in her premises. However, many other religious questions do not emerge from her analysis of the data.
It can be concluded that Illouz’s work is an innovative analysis of a number of issues concerning love suffering and the construction of romantic self in modernity. Acknowledging the limits of her analysis, Illouz suggests several intersections to explore, and different boundary areas to examine: from love, economics, and the modern self to cultural and institutional causes of romantic pain. She pursues the political and ethical aim of reflexively rethinking women’s emotional vulnerability, doing so by fruitfully criticizing political approaches such as feminism, and cultural devices such as psychotherapies. If sociology has neglected mental and emotional suffering to date, the book enables sociology to turn to analysis of the self’s emotional and institutional vulnerability. Only sociology, Illouz argues, can explain ‘what makes love such a chronic experience of discomfort.’ In this regard, the book also contributes to a metaphorical redemption of sociology outside the academic world.