Why ​Love Hurts 1 csillagozás

A Sociological Explanation
Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts

Few ​of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged – these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.

Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The… (tovább)

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Polity, Cambridge, 2012
294 oldal · puhatáblás · ISBN: 9780745661520

Enciklopédia 7


Most olvassa 1

Várólistára tette 2


Népszerű idézetek

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Courtship in the Austerian world is structured by myriad invisible rules. Non-sociologists tend to think of rules as limiting. But for sociologists, rules are also enabling, the medium through which actors relate to each other, build expectations about each other, and trudge well-known paths with each other. Rituals – a set of rules known to actors in order to engage in or disengage from relationships – are similar to a well-drawn pathway in a jungle of possibilities. They create expectations about what can and should happen next. To put it differently, rituals are a powerful symbolic tool to ward off anxieties created by uncertainty. Thus, in the nineteenth century among the propertied classes, there were, if not scrupulously observed rules, at least codes and rituals of conduct that organized encounters and that needed to be respected in order for men and women to be proved worthy of each other. In this romantic order, actors derive a sense of propriety from the rules of conduct they observe.

29. oldal; The Great Transformation of Love

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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As already mentioned, the sheer increase in and abundance of real and imagined sexual partners are a major cause of the transformation in the ecology of choice. This transformation has emerged as a result of the collapse of religious, ethnic, racial, and class rules of endogamy, which in principle allows anyone to access the marriage market. It is accentuated by the extraordinary increase in the number of potential partners available through the medium of the Internet. This abundance of choice, real and imagined, induces important cognitive changes in the formation of romantic emotions and the process of settling on one love object. In fact, research on the effect of the abundance of choice on the process of decision-making suggests clearly that the greater availability of options inhibits rather than enables the capacity to commit to a single object or relationship.

91. oldal; Commitment Phobia

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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The move from pre-modern to modern courtship is the move from publicly shared meanings and rituals – the man and woman belonged to a common social world – to private interactions in which another's self is evaluated according to multiple and volatile criteria such as physical attractiveness, emotional chemistry, „compatibility” of tastes, and psychological makeup. In other words, the changes undergone by love in modernity have to do with the transformation of the very tools of evaluation on which recognition depends: that is, with their refinement (how elaborate they are) and their individualization. Social class and even „character” belong to a world where the criteria to establish value are known, publicly performed, and there for everyone to judge. Rank, value, and character are publicly – that is, objectively – established and shared. Because social worth has become performative – that is, because worth must be negotiated in and through individualized tastes, and because of the individualization of the criteria for worth – the self is faced with new forms of uncertainty. Individualization is a source of uncertainty because the criteria for evaluating others cease to be objective: that is, cease to be submitted to the examination of several social agents who share the same social codes. Instead, they become the result of a private and subjective dynamics of taste.

122. oldal; The Demand of Recognition

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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To love someone is to look at them with wide-opened and knowing eyes.

23. oldal; The Great Transformation of Love

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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Why does Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice (1813), greet Darcy's arrogant and dismissive comments about her appearance ("she is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me…") neither with dejection nor with a sense of humiliation but rather with wit and spirit? Because his scorn does not shape or affect her sense of self and value.

24. oldal; The Great Transformation of Love

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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From the standpoint of modern sensibility, Jane Austen's heroines are not only uncannily self-possessed but also strangely detached from the need to be, as we would say in modern parlance, „validated” by their suitors. Consider, for example, how Anne reacts to Wentworth's evaluation of her lost beauty. To that extent, their selfhood seems to be less dependent on a man's gaze than is the selfhood of modern women.

25. oldal; The Great Transdormation of Love

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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In contrast, when the self becomes essentialized, when love is defined as addressing the innermost essence of the person, not his/her class and position, love becomes a direct bestowal of value on the person, and a rejection becomes a rejection of the self.

34. oldal; The Great Transformation of Love

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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The sexualization of the romantic encounter has been standardized by typecasting certain body and facial features as desirable. In this process, the models put forward by the fashion and cultural industries come to occupy a privileged role. The standardization of beauty and sexiness in turn has the effect of delineating a hierarchy of sexual attractiveness: some people are clearly sexually more attractive than others according to well-rehearsed cultural codes. Because criteria of sexiness are codified, they can be used to evaluate and rank prospective partners, thus making one rank some people higher on a „sexual attractiveness” scale than others. Consequently, the subjectivization of choices – making the self into the only valid source of evaluation – goes hand in hand with the standardization of sexy looks and the capacity to rank them.

50. oldal; The Great Transformation of Love

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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Nineteenth-century middle-class masculinity was defined in terms of the capacity to feel and express strong feelings, make and keep promises, and to commit to another with determination and resolution. […] Karen Lystra, another specialist of nineteenth-century courtship practices, confirms that „middle- to upper-middle-class men were allowed a range of expression that paralleled, if it did not precisely duplicate, women's.”

64. oldal; Commitment Phobia

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation

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A sexual field as such is dominated by men because they can stay in them longer and can have a broader sample of women to choose from. This greater availability of choice makes men – especially upper-middle-class men – dominate the sexual field. Such a domination is manifest in their greater reluctance to enter long-lasting bonds. This dynamic of sexual fields and the new ecology and architecture of choice create the conditions for emotional domination of women by men and have given men an advantage, for three main reasons. First, men's social status now depends much more on their economic achievement than on having families and children. Second, men are not biologically and culturally defined by reproduction, thus their search can span a much longer time frame than can women's. Finally, because men use sexuality as status, because norms of sexiness put a premium on youth, and because age discrimination gives an advantage to men, the samples of potential partners from which men can choose are much larger than they are for women. Middle-class heterosexual men and women thus approach the sexual field in different ways. Because men are more directly dependent on the market for their economic survival than on marriage, and because they are not – or are less – bond by the imperative of romantic recognition, use sexuality as a status, and display autonomy, they tend to have a cumulative and emotionally detached sexuality. Women, by contrast, are caught in more conflicted strategies of attachment and detachment. Men's emotional detachment and commitment phobia are thus an expression of their position in sexual fields, created by a new ecology of choice.

243. oldal; Epilogue

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation


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Angela Chen: Ace
Gordon Finlayson: Habermas
Deborah Tuerkheimer: Credible
Dina L. McMillan: But He Says He Loves Me
Stephanie Wood: Fake
Abby Ellin: Duped
Cho Nam-Joo: Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Ariana Kelly: Phone Booth
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel
Andy Ngo: Unmasked