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Let me make a bold suggestion: the transformation undergone by romantic choices is akin to the process that Karl Polanyi has described for economic relationships and that he dubbed the “great transformation.”57 The “great transformation” of economic relations refers to the process by which the capi…

[...] Thus, another noticeable difference with modern sensibility is that this woman does not think it proper to communicate her inner authentic feelings. On the contrary, to be adequate is to be able to hide these feelings and to disguise them under an appearance of cheerfulness. Being able to pl…

The vision of love outlined here emanates directly from what nineteenth-century men and women called “character.” In contradistinction to a long Western tradition that presents love as an emotion that overtakes one’s capacity to judge and that idealizes the object of love to the point of blindness,…

Fourth, are there cultural norms and techniques to hold one’s desires and wants in suspicion? For example, Christian culture contains a built-in suspicion of one’s own (sexual and other) wants and desires, whereas a culture of consumer self-realization, on the contrary, encourages the view of desir…

[...] Psychic suffering contains an experience which threatens the integrity of the self. Suffering in contemporary intimate interpersonal relationships reflects the situation of the self in conditions of modernity. Romantic suffering is not parenthetical to presumably more serious forms of sufferi…