Analyzing the sociology of the love experience, Eva Illouz analyzes its great transformation: if the marital and sexual market today values choice and freedom, it also weakens heterosexual conjugality and generates specific suffering, particularly for women.
“ The love suffering experienced by (Catherine Ernshaw and Emma Bovary) has changed in content, color, texture “. For Eva Illouz, Catherine Earnshaw’s love for Heathcliff, Emma Bovary’s despair when she receives the letter from Rodolphe Boulanger breaking the promise of their escape after their long clandestine love affair, illustrate the literary evocation of pain in love. However, they no longer correspond to our modern loves.
What has changed ? It is not a question of saying that unhappiness in love is new, but that the ways of choosing our partner and the ways of experiencing lovelessness are no longer the same. This is due to three main reasons. The first and most general is the little “ normative prohibitions “. In (late) modernity, as the author defines it—the period after the First World War—norms can be transgressed with less difficulty than in the time of Emily Brontë or Jane Austen. Likewise, the economic obstacles encountered by heterogamous couples have been partly removed: even if class relations constrain the ideal of love, love can prevail. This mixes and integrates emotional and economic strategies.
The second reason is linked to the existence of an arsenal of experts whose job it is to come to our aid in a situation of disenchantment: psychological counselors, specialists in couples therapy, lawyers specializing in divorce, experts in mediation, etc. Without forgetting the imposing literature of self-help. And in fact, heartbreak often leads men and women to be interested in this literature which offers both understanding pain and overcoming it.
Finally, the third and final reason for this social evolution of love is that today the victims of the feeling of lovelessness, instead of remaining silent, share their problems much more than before with friends, and more recently on forums on the internet.
Love as a commodity
Based on these changes, Eva Illouz offers a sociology of disenchantment, and dissects this new social organization of suffering. She thus attacks those who claim that these experiences of suffering in love are the result of a fragile and immature, even defective, psyche: we have all suffered from love, no one is spared. !
Can we then identify the actors of disenchantment ? Clinical psychology and Freudian culture, to which many are faithful, defend the idea that it is the individual and he alone who is responsible for his love and erotic life, and that the family is the source of their configuration. In other words, the chosen partner is a direct reflection of childhood experiences, so that the psyche becomes responsible for the therefore inevitable love misfortunes. Eva Illouz, on the contrary, tries to demonstrate that sorrows are the product of institutions, or of the structuring of emotional life by institutions.
She then offers a feminist reading of love, which understands it as a commodity: “ love is produced by concrete social relationships, (…) love circulates in a market made up of competing and unequal actors, (…where) certain people have greater capacity to define the conditions in which they are loved than others » (p. 30). Sociology, according to her, has neglected love and various types of suffering that it generates, leaving emotions to clinical psychology. While famine and poverty have been analyzed by anthropologists as social suffering, other types of suffering, such as anxiety and depression, have been neglected despite their ordinary nature.
Reading the “ change of the modern romantic self » that this book undertakes includes three main parts: the analysis of the modalities of structuring romantic desires (the loving choice, chapters I and II), that of the ways in which we ask for loving recognition (chapter III) and finally that of the modes of activation of romantic desire (chapters IV and V). The materials are very varied. In addition to scientific literature (psychologists, philosophers, sociologists), as well as a vast literature from the 18th and 19th centuries mainly, it mobilizes e-books, columns from Anglo-Saxon newspapers (New York Times And The Independent) devoted to love or sexuality, but also films, television series, self-help forums, self-help, and in-depth interviews with middle-class heterosexual people, most of whom live in the United States. We detect two biases: favoring the point of view of women, particularly those from the middle classes opting for a family life, and that of heterosexual love which, according to her, best illustrates the denial of the economic bases of romantic choice because he mixes emotional and economic logics (for a feminist reading of this question, see in particular the work of Viviana Zelizer, Arlie R. Hochschild and Paola Tabet). Heterosexual women, and in particular those who want children, are thus at the center of the analysis, and ultimately the author’s privileged interlocutors.
Am I loved ?
In the first and second chapters, Illouz defines what she calls “ the great transformation of love “, namely the conditions (the social environment and the processes – emotional or not – of evaluation of the partner) in which the romantic choice is made, conditions which are the “ trademark » of contemporary love.
A few factors define this modern romantic choice: the selection of a partner is made within the framework of a very competitive market where desire is shaped by social status. The most sexy » would also be the one who is the richest and most powerful. THE “ sex appeal » becomes a characteristic of partner selection which contributes to social stratification. Added to this is a competition for first place in the heterosexual market: the man with the most sexual experience is the most desired. Finally, the entry of desire into the economic market is also regulated by the laws of the latter, namely supply and demand, risk aversion, scarcity and glut.
One of the expressions of this great transformation is the “ commitment phobia » of men (chapter II). In this highly competitive market, men and women can freely choose between several partners. But it is men who most express a difficulty in committing, mainly linked to the multiplicity of potential choices.
If the “ commitment phobia » is particularly masculine, the demand for recognition (chapter III) comes rather, according to Eva Illouz, from women. In the 19th century, the question of commitment was not posed in the same way as today. In modernity, commitment constitutes the accomplishment of the relationship, it is what will make the difference between relationships “ serious » (marriage, civil pact, etc.) and relationships « light »: go out, have fun, even if it can last a few months or even years. At XIXe century, neither man nor woman hid their desire to commit, whereas in modernity a common approach in romantic relationships is to put this commitment at a distance. Some hide this desire for fear of showing themselves vulnerable, for a need to maintain a self-image, or for a phobia of commitment.
Eva Illouz sees in this asymmetry the symbolic violence of modern love: “ men master the rules of recognition and commitment “. Most of the women interviewed here express fear and anxiety about telling their partner how they feel, since they don’t want to “ put pressure “. They also express their need for recognition: “ a woman won’t walk away from a man if he tells her he loves her, whereas a man will freak out, and think she wants the ring and the white dress » (p. 224).
The rationalization of heterosexuality
For Eva Illouz, this transformation is a process of rationalization. However, this rationality is not opposed to emotions, quite the contrary: it “ is an institutionalized cultural force that has come to restructure emotional life from within (…), it has altered the collective narratives through which emotions are understood and negotiated » (p. 254). She underlines the place of “ popular Freudianism » in this evolution, namely the interpretive frameworks of psychology and psychoanalysis, but also of biology, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. What they have in common is that they have woven a thread between the period of childhood and adult love experiences: beyond the change of characters, adult love would only be another facet of childish love. In this sense, love must be explained and controlled and above all remain consistent with the “ well-being ”, each maximizing their interests.
The final factor contributing to the rationalization of heterosexual love is feminism. The latter views romantic love as a cultural practice that produces inequalities between sexes and classes. It invites people, mainly women, to revise the patterns that regulate their sexual attraction, to establish symmetry in their emotional relationships, and finally to introduce new “ equivalence principles “. Without forgetting, however, the impact of new technologies, mainly the Internet, which act in the selection of the partner according to market logic.
In an article published in the Israeli daily Haaretz, “ Don’t be my Valentine: Are couples becoming a thing of the past ? », Eva Illouz questions the structure of the couple which is currently “ de facto, a proclamation against the culture of choice, the culture of maximizing choice and against the idea of the self as a permanent place of excitement, self-actualization and enjoyment. Couples operate according to the economy of scarcity or lack. (…Being in a relationship) requires the ability to single out the other, to suspend calculation, to tolerate boredom, to put an end to self-development, to live with mediocre sexuality, to prefer commitment to contractual insecurity “.
Finally, the couples described in Why does love hurt do not recognize themselves in the image of the monogamous couple, just like other types of couple that Eva Illouz does not talk about: young people, queer, same-sex couples and mixed couples. Would the latter be influenced by the market, destined for disenchantment? ? Would they be governed by the principle of equivalence and saved from the boredom specific to a monogamous conjugality? ? Either way, this book tells the story of heterosexual love and modern suffering, a conjugality no less violent nor less asymmetrical than romantic love, especially for women.