The End of Love. Eva Illouz
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us live better lives, they have produced little or no understanding of what plagues our romantic lives collectively. Surely the myriad stories heard in the privacy of psychological consultation have a recurring structure and common themes that transcend the particularity of their tellers. It is not even difficult to guess the recurring theme and structure of the complaints voiced in those settings: “Why do I have difficulties forming or maintaining intimate, loving relationships?” “Is this relationship good or bad for me?” “Should I stay in this marriage?” What is common to the questions endlessly reverberated throughout continual all-invasive therapeutic advice in the form of counseling, workshops, or self-help books used to guide our life is a deep, nagging uncertainty about emotional life, a difficulty in interpreting our own and others’ feelings, knowing how and what to compromise about, and a difficulty in knowing what we owe others and what they owe us. As psychotherapist Leslie Bell put it: “[I]n interviews and in my psychotherapy practice with young women, I have found them to be more confused than ever about not only how to get what they want, but what they want.”6 Such confusion, common inside and outside the office of psychologists, is often taken to be the result of the ambivalence of the human psyche, the effect of a delayed entry into adulthood, or of a psychological confusion produced by conflicting cultural messages about femininity. Yet, as I show in this book, emotional uncertainty in the realm of love, romance, and sex is the direct sociological effect of the ways in which the consumer market, therapeutic industry, and the technology of the Internet have been assembled and embedded by the ideology of individual choice that has become the main cultural frame organizing personal freedom. The type of uncertainty that plagues contemporary relationships is a sociological phenomenon: it did not always exist, or at least not to this extent; it was not as widespread, at least not to this extent; it did not have the content it has today for men and women; and it certainly did not command the systematic attention of experts and knowledge systems of all persuasions. The puzzles, difficulties, and elusiveness that are the characteristics of many relationships and the source of psychological gloss are nothing but an expression of what we may call a generalized “uncertainty” in relations. That so many modern lives display the same uncertainty does not point to the universality of a conflicted unconscious but rather to the globalization of the conditions of life.
This book is another installment in a two-decades-long study on the ways in which capitalism and the culture of modernity have transformed our emotional and romantic life. If there is a single tenet that my work on emotions has advocated for the last twenty years it is that the analysis of the disorganization of private, intimate life cannot come from psychology alone. Sociology has an immense contribution to make in its insistence that psychological experiences—needs, compulsions, inner conflicts, desires, or anxiety—play and replay the dramas of collective life, and that our subjective experience reflects and prolongs social structures, are, in fact, concrete, embodied, lived structures. A non-psychological analysis of the inner life is all the more urgent because the capitalist market and consumer culture compel actors to make their interiority into the only plane of existence that feels real, with autonomy, freedom, and pleasure in all its forms as guidelines for such interiority.7 While we may experience our retreat to individuality, emotionality, and interiority as sites of self-empowerment, we are in fact ironically implementing and performing the very premises of an economic and capitalist subjectivity, which fragments the social world and makes its objectivity unreal. This is why a sociological critique of sexuality and emotions is crucial to a critique of capitalism itself.
I bring my inquiry into emotional life, capitalism, and modernity to a preliminary conclusion by engaging more forcefully with the question that has been put on the table of liberal philosophy since the nineteenth century: does freedom jeopardize the possibility of forming meaningful and binding bonds, more specifically romantic bonds? In its general form, this question has been insistently asked for the last two hundred years, in the context of the demise of community and the rise of market relations,8 but has been less frequently raised in the emotional realm, and this despite the fact that emotional freedom has entirely redefined the nature of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and is no less central to modernity than other forms of freedom. Nor is it less fraught with ambiguities and aporias.
Love as Freedom
Love—the quintessentially fusional emotion—paradoxically contains a fragment of the vast and complex history of autonomy and freedom, a history that has been told mostly in political terms. To take one example, the genre of the romantic comedy—which emerged with the Greek Menander, continued with the Romans (the plays of Plautus or Terence), and flourished in the Renaissance—expressed the claim to freedom by young people against parents, tutors, and old men. While in India or China love was told in stories shaped by religious values, was part and parcel of the life of gods, and did not as such oppose social authority, in Western (and to a relative but lesser extent Eastern) Europe and in the United States, love progressively detached itself from the religious cosmology and was cultivated by aristocratic elites in search of a life-style.9 As a result, love, previously destined for God,10 was the main vector for the formation of emotional individualism,11 directing emotions to a person whose interiority is perceived as independent from social institutions. Love slowly affirmed itself against rules of endogamy, against patriarchal or Church authority, and against community control. An eighteenth-century bestseller like Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) raised the question of the individual’s right to his or her sentiments, and thus the right to choose the object of his or her love and to marry according to one’s will. Interiority, freedom, emotions, and choice formed a single matrix, which would revolutionize matrimonial practices and the place of marriage. Will, in this new cultural and emotional order, was no longer defined as the capacity to regulate one’s desires (as in Christian religiosity), but precisely as the opposite capacity to act according to their injunction, and to choose an object that corresponded to individual emotions as emanating from one’s will. In that respect, in the personal realm romantic love and emotions became the ground for moral claims to freedom and autonomy, as powerful as these would be in the public and male realm of politics, with the exception that this revolution did not have its public demonstrations, Parliament bills, and physical struggles. It was led by novelists, proto-feminists, philosophers, and thinkers on sexuality as well as by ordinary men and women. The claim to emotional autonomy contained in love was a powerful agent of social change, altering in fundamental ways the process of pairing up, the vocation of marriage, and the authority of traditional social agencies.12 And thus, while seemingly private and emotional, romantic love in fact contained a proto-political aspiration. The right to choose one’s object of love became slowly the right to make individuals’ feelings be their own source of authority,13 itself an important part of the history of autonomy. The history of love in the West is thus not just a minor theme in the large-scale fresco of the history of modernity but was in fact a principal vector recasting the relationship of individuals to marriage and kinship, with dramatic consequences for the relationship that marriage had hitherto entertained with the economic sphere. Bestowing moral authority to love and sentiments changed marriage, and in changing marriage it changed patterns of reproduction and sexuality, of economic accumulation and exchange.14
What we call emotional and personal freedom is a multiform phenomenon that emerged with the consolidation of a private sphere, far away from the long arm of the community and the Church, and slowly became protected by the state and by privacy laws; it fed into the cultural upheavals spearheaded by artistic elites and later by media industries; and finally, it helped formulate women’s rights to dispose of their bodies (a woman’s body had not belonged to her but more properly to her guardians). Emotional autonomy thus contains claims about the freedom of the interiority of the subject as well as (later) claims to sexual-bodily freedom even if both types of freedoms have different cultural histories: emotional freedom is grounded in the history of freedom of conscience and in the history of privacy, while sexual freedom evolved from the history of women’s struggle for emancipation and from new legal conceptions of the body. Women indeed did not properly own their bodies until recently (they could not, for example, refuse the sexual act to their husband). Sexual and emotional freedom became closely intertwined, the two becoming handmaidens