By our own standards, Catherine and Emma’s pain seems extreme, but it is still intelligible to us. Yet, as this book seeks to claim, the romantic agony that both of these women experience has changed its content, color, and texture. First of all, the opposition between society and love which each enacts in her suffering is hardly relevant to modern societies. Indeed, there would be few economic obstacles or normative prohibitions preventing either Catherine or Emma from making their love their first and only choice. If anything, our contemporary sense of appropriateness would command us to follow the dictates of our heart, not of our social milieu. Second, a battery of experts would now be likely to come to the rescue of a hesitant Catherine and of Emma’s passionless marriage: psychological counseling, couple therapy, divorce lawyers, mediation specialists, would massively appropriate and adjudicate over the private dilemmas of prospective or bored wives. In the absence of (or in conjunction with) experts’ help, their modern counterparts would have shared the secret of their love with others, most likely female friends, or, at the very least, occasional anonymous friends found on the Internet, thus considerably diminishing the solitude of their passion. Between their desire and their despair, there would have been a thick flow of words, self-analysis, and friendly or expert advice. A contemporary Catherine or Emma would have spent a great deal of time reflecting and talking about their pain and likely found its causes in their own (or their lovers’) deficient childhood. They would have derived a sense of glory not from the experience of grief, but precisely from having overcome it, through an arsenal of self-help therapeutic techniques. Modern romantic pain generates an almost endless gloss, the purpose of which is both to understand and extirpate its causes. Dying, committing suicide, and running away to a cloister no longer belong to our cultural repertoires. This is not to say, obviously, that we, “post-” or “late” moderns, do not know something about the agony of love. In fact we may possibly know more about it than our predecessors. But what it does suggest is that the social organization of romantic pain has changed profoundly. This book is about understanding the nature of that transformation through an examination of the changes undergone in three different and crucial aspects of the self: the will (how we want something), recognition (what matters for our sense of worth), and desire (what we long for and how we long for it).

Precisely because we live in a time where the idea of individual responsibility reigns supreme, the vocation of sociology remains vital. In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of systematic economic exploitation, it is now urgent to claim not that the failures of our private lives are the result of weak psyches, but rather that the vagaries and miseries of our emotional life are shaped by institutional arrangements. The purpose of this book is thus to vastly shift the angle of analysis of what is wrong in contemporary relationships. What is wrong are not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but the set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have come to structure modern selves and identities.

For example, when (heterosexual) love became the constitutive theme of the novel, few noticed that it became tightly intertwined with another theme, no less central to the bourgeois novel and to modernity at large: that of social mobility. As suggested by the two examples of Catherine and Emma discussed earlier, romantic love was almost always inevitably interwoven with the question of social mobility. That is, one of the central questions asked by the novel (and later by Hollywood cinema) was and remains whether and under what conditions love can trump social mobility, and, vice versa, whether socio-economic compatibility should be a necessary condition for love. The shaping of the modern individual was at one and the same time emotional and economic, romantic and rational. This is because the centrality of love in marriage (and in the novel) coincided with the waning of marriage as a tool of family alliances and marked the new role of love for social mobility. But far from marking the demise of economic calculus, it in fact deepened it, as women and men would increasingly move up (and down) the social ladder through the social alchemy of love. Because love made the fit between marriage and strategies of economic and social reproduction less explicit and formal, the modern choice of a mate progressively included and mixed both emotional and economic aspirations. Love now incorporated and contained rational and strategic interests, merging the economic and emotional dispositions of actors into one single cultural matrix. One of the key cultural transformations accompanying modernity was thus the co-mingling of love with economic strategies of social mobility. This is also why this book contains a number of methodological biases: it addresses heterosexual love more markedly than homosexual love because the former contains a denial of the economic underpinnings of the choice of a love object, and fuses both economic and emotional logics. These two logics are sometimes harmoniously and seamlessly reconciled, but they equally often splinter the romantic sentiment from within. The co-mingling of love and economic calculus at once makes love central to modern lives and is at the heart of the conflicting pressures to which love has been submitted. This intertwining of the emotional and the economic is thus one of the threads through which I offer to reinterpret love in modernity, showing how choice, rationality, interest, competition, have transformed the modes of meeting, seeking, courting a partner, ways of consulting and making decisions about one’s sentiments. Another bias of this book is that it addresses the condition of love more markedly from the standpoint of women than of men, and more especially from the standpoint of those women who opt largely for marriage, reproduction, and middle-class lifestyles. As I hope to show here, it is the combination of these aspirations and their location in a free market of sexual encounters which creates new forms of emotional domination of women by men. [...]

[...] 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 suffering because, as I hope to show, it displays and performs the dilemmas and forms of powerless-ness of the self in modernity. As I document by analyzing a variety of sources (in-depth interviews, Internet sites, the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, the Independent’s sex column, novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, self-help books to dating, love, and romance)32 experiences of abandonment and unreciprocated love are as crucial to one’s life narrative as other (political or economic) forms of social humiliation.

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 desire as the legitimate grounds for choice. Culturally designed suspicions (or lack of them) are likely to shape the course and outcome of decisions.

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, love is here solidly anchored in Knightley’s capacity for discernment. This is why Emma’s faults are no less emphasized than her virtues. The only person who loves Emma is also the only one to see her faults. To love someone is to look at them with wide-opened and knowing eyes. And, contrary to what we would expect today, such capacity for discernment (and awareness of another’s fl aws) does not entail any ambivalent feeling toward Emma. On the contrary, Knightley’s own excellence of character makes him forgive her faults, discern (what will later prove to be) her own “excellence of mind,”10 and strive to improve her character with fervor and even passion. Understanding Emma’s faults is not incompatible with being thoroughly committed to her because both emanate from the same moral source. Knightley’s love itself is supremely moral not only because he makes the object of his love accountable to a moral code, but also because to love Emma is intertwined with the moral project of shaping her mind. When he looks at her anxiously, it is not lust that burns in him, but rather his desire to see her do the right thing. In this particular conception of love, it is not the unique originality of the person that we love, but rather the person’s capacity to stand for those values we – and others –

[...] 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 play her role convincingly consists in helping her husband play his own role, and it is from this that she derives a sense of fulfillment and adequacy. Furthermore, it is likely that this woman is not even trying to understand and express her true feelings. She is more concerned by the fact that in expressing her negative feelings, she might make her husband feel inadequate in his capacity to make her happy. In other words, she views it as her responsibility to maintain his own sense of adequacy, defined as his capacity to make her happy. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we may notice how she states in a neutral way that he cannot understand her. In fact, she invokes this as a way to explain and excuse the fact that he cannot be made a part of her private distress. This is in stark contrast with the way in which modern men but especially women expect to reveal their intimate self and to intertwine it with that of their partner. Pre-modern conjugal relations presuppose intricately connected selves, but in this interconnectedness the self is neither naked nor authentic. The two selves displayed here are, by modern standards, emotionally distant (they do not let each other peek at the content of their thoughts and emotions); yet, they are inextricably intertwined and interdependent. In contrast, modern selves expect each other to be emotionally naked and intimate, but independent. In a modern marriage, it is two highly individuated and differentiated selves that come together;53 it is the fine-tuned compatibility of two constituted selves that makes up a successful marriage, not the display of roles. The fine-tuning of the emotional makeup of two persons becomes the basis for intimacy.

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 capitalist market dis-embedded economic action from society and from moral/normative frameworks, organized economy in self-regulated markets, and came to subsume society under economy. What we call the “triumph” of romantic love in relations between the sexes consisted first and foremost in the dis-embedding of individual romantic choices from the moral and social fabric of the group and in the emergence of a self-regulated market of encounters. Modern criteria to evaluate a love object have become disentangled from publicly shared moral frameworks. This disentanglement occurred because of a transformation of the content of the criteria for selecting a mate – which have become both physical/sexual and emotional/psychological – and because of a transformation of the very process of mate selection – which has become both more subjective and more individualized.

The “great transformation” of love is characterized by a number of factors: (1) the normative deregulation of the mode of evaluation of prospective partners – that is, its disentanglement from group and communal frameworks and the role of mass media in defining criteria of attractiveness and worth; (2) an increasing tendency to view one’s sexual and romantic partner simultaneously in psychological and sexual terms (with the former being ultimately subsumed under the latter); (3) and, finally, the emergence of sexual fields, the fact that sexuality as such plays an increasingly important role in the competition between actors on the marriage market.

Undoubtedly, along with the feminist and bohemian claims to sexual freedom, consumer culture has been the most significant cultural force that has contributed to the sexualization of women, and later of men. Writing about the 1920s, John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman argue that “American capitalism no longer required an insistent ethic of work and asceticism in order to accumulate the capital to build an industrial infrastructure. Instead, corporate leaders needed consumers. [. . .] An ethic that encouraged the purchase of consumer products also fostered an acceptance of pleasure, self-gratification, and personal satisfaction, a perspective easily translated to the province of sex.”61 Consumer culture put desire at the center of subjectivity, and sexuality became a sort of generalized metaphor of desire.

Third, because there are no more formal mechanisms by which to pair people up, individuals internalize the economic dispositions that also help them make choices which must be at once economic and emotional, rational and irrational. The romantic habitus has thus the characteristic of operating at once economically and emotionally. Sometimes this habitus makes choices in which economic calculus is harmoniously reconciled with emotions, but sometimes this habitus is subject to internal tensions, as when one has to choose between a “socially appropriate” and a “sexy” person. This is why the sexual-romantic habitus has become a very complicated one, precisely because it contains a variety of dispositions.