The aristocratic ideal of suffering was intertwined with Christian values: it did not make reciprocity the condition for love, and it viewed suffering as a purification of the soul. Christianity provided a narrative framework to organize the experience of suffering, and even viewed it as the theological mark of salvation. Christianity, as a cultural frame, made sense of suffering, made it into a positive and even necessary experience, one that elevated the soul and allowed one to achieve a godlike state. In this cultural matrix, then, suffering does not undermine the self; it helps constitute and exalt it. With the dwindling of Christianity, romantic suffering became yet another source of self-worth in artistic expression, and especially in the Romantic movement. As in Christianity, suffering was thought to be an unavoidable, necessary, and superior dimension of existence. Lord Byron, one of the most representative figures of the Romantic movement, praised self-destruction and the destruction of others in love. He could thus write: “My embrace was fatal. [. . .] I loved her, and destroy’d her.”56 Byron, like other Romantics, was a sensualist who viewed pain as the manifestation of a greater existence. “The great object of life is sensation,” he wrote to his future wife, “to feel that we exist, even though in pain.”57 Thus, the lack of reciprocity was not experienced as an annihilation of the self, because recognition and self-worth were not based on the experience of love and because the self was thought to express its vital energies in a variety of experiences, ranging from loving to agonizing. Romantic expressions of romantic suffering were culturally framed and constructed under the organizing experience of melancholia. What characterizes melancholia is that it aestheticizes the feeling of love and, as in courtly love, ennobles the person experiencing it. Romantic melancholia was mostly male and was integrated into a model of the self in which suffering bestowed heroism on the afflicted man, who thus proved the depth of his soul through his capacity to endure. In melancholia, suffering does not affect or undermine the self’s sense of value, but helps express a form of delicacy and sophistication of the soul. One may go even further and claim that for those affected it accrued a kind of symbolic/emotional capital. Moreover, as these ideas of love and suffering were often, though not exclusively, a male prerogative, this may also indicate that they functioned to enhance the image of masculinity as a vital energy, as a form of prowess.

Modern romantic suffering is also to be excised, but with radically different models of the self: it is to be excised in the name of a utilitarian and hedonist model of the healthy psyche in which suffering marks either a fl awed psychological development or a fundamental threat to one’s sense of social worth and self-respect. That is, in contemporary culture, a well-developed character is expressed through one’s capacity to overcome one’s experience of suffering or, even better, to avoid it altogether. Romantic suffering has stopped being part of a psychic and social economy of character formation and even threatens it.

More than that: what is properly modern about romantic suffering is the fact that the object of love is intricately intertwined with the self’s value and worth, and that suffering has become the mark of a flawed self. The result is that the defection of the object of love undermines the self. The ontological insecurity of the self and the need for inter-subjective recognition are thus made more acute by the fact that there are no further cultural/spiritual frameworks, as it were, to recycle it and make it play a role in character formation.

Many elements make this story typical of a certain pattern in the relationships between men and women. The woman here is swayed by the man: that is, she is persuaded to enter the relationship. What persuades her to enter the relationship is not a mystery; it is the fact that it endows her with abundant recognition, which suggests that recognition can precede and generate love. This pattern is particularly relevant for women, who are less likely than men to have access to public channels to affirm their worth; thus their sense of worth is tied particularly to romantic recognition. Also, even if this woman did not formulate a clear request, the fact she “gave up” everything was (probably rightly) interpreted by her boyfriend as a desire to commit everything to him. Finally, the fact that she could not bring herself formally to request from him a reciprocal act of commitment suggests that autonomy trumps the need for recognition, that she herself acted in an entirely committed way, yet could not secure a reciprocal and similar pledge from her boyfriend.

[...] the “enchanted” experience of love and romance has become difficult to subscribe to. That is, although love may remain a very meaningful experience for most people, it does not engage and mobilize the totality of the self. This in turn raises the question: Why has love lost its capacity to be experienced as “enchantment,” a surrender of reason and the self? I argue here that the loss of power of love to generate romantic beliefs is the result of the rationalization of such beliefs in the three arenas of science, technology, and politics.

A third way that psychology has contributed to rationalizing the experience of love is that it deems romantic suffering an unacceptable and unjustifiable symptom, emanating from insufficiently mature psyches. Whereas “pain was an absolutely normal part of the nineteenth-century emotional response to sharing an identity with another human being,”18 in contemporary psychological culture, suffering no longer signals an emotional experience stretching above and beyond the boundaries of the self: that is, it is no longer the sign of selfless devotion or of an elevated soul. Such love – based on self-sacrifice, fusion, and longing for absoluteness – came to be viewed as the symptom of an incomplete emotional development. The cultural equation of love with suffering is similar to the equation of love with an experience of both transcendence and consummation in which love is affirmed in an ostentatious display of self-loss.19 Utilitarian models of the polity were transposed to the psyche, and in this new therapeutic culture, ideals of self-sacrifice and self-abandonment were held to be the illegitimate sign of an unhealthy psyche (or a sign that one “suffered” to get some hidden psychic benefit), and hence deeply suspect since autonomy and the capacity to preserve one’s self-interest have become synonymous with mental health.

[...] Modern selves are infinitely better equipped to deal with the repeated experiences of abandonment, break-ups, or betrayals than ever in the past through detachment, autonomy, hedonism, cynicism, and irony. In fact, from a young age, most people expect the road to romantic love to be a highly bumpy one. Yet, my point in this book has been that because we have developed many strategies to cope with the fragility and interchangeability of relationships, many aspects of contemporary culture deprive the self of the capacity both to enter and to live the full experience of passion and to withstand the doubts and uncertainties attendant to the process of loving and getting attached to someone. Love has changed its form in the sense that it has changed the ways in which it hurts.

[...] One of the main points of this book is fairly simple: in conditions of modernity, men have far more sexual and emotional choice than women, and it is this imbalance that creates emotional domination. Thus, the point of this book has been to bring sociology where psychology traditionally reigns, and to try to do what sociologists of culture are best at: that is, to show that the deepest recesses of our subjectivity are shaped by such “big” entities as the transformation of the ecology and architecture of sexual choice. Ordinary experiences of emotional suffering – feeling unloved or abandoned, struggling with the detachment of others – are shaped by the core institutions and values of modernity. The grand ambition of this book is thus to have done to emotions – at least to romantic love – what Marx did to commodities: to show that they are shaped by social relations; that they do not circulate in a free and unconstrained way; that their magic is social; and that that they contain and condense the institutions of modernity.

The cooling of desire and the weakness of will. Irony, commitment phobia, ambivalence, disappointment – all central themes of this book and central features of the experience of love – constitute the four main components of what I have called the de-structuration of the will and desire, whose orientation has shifted from the formation of intense bonds to the formation of cool individuality. All four components have in common the fact they express the difficulty of mobilizing the totality of the self in desiring another, the affirmation of autonomous selfhood in the deepest recesses of subjectivity, and the more general cooling of passion. Indeed, the very capacity to activate desire, to settle on a love object, to subscribe to the culture of love, has changed. It is desire itself that has changed its intensity and the ways in which it radiates from the self. First, faced with greater choice, desire relies on highly cognized forms of introspection and self-scrutiny. Second, comparisons between different possible choices dampen strong emotions. Third, desire now takes place in a cultural environment dominated by proceduralism: that is, abstract and formal rules by which to conduct relations to others and one’s own emotional life. Fourth, while pre-modern desire was governed by an economy of scarcity, it is now governed by an economy of abundance caused both by sexual normative freedom and by the commodification of sex. Finally, because desire has migrated to the realm of imagination, the possibility to sustain desire in real interactions is threatened. In that sense, desire becomes both weaker and stronger: weaker because it is not backed up by the will – choice tends to enervate rather than embolden the will – and stronger when it migrates to the vicarious realm of virtual and vicarious relationships.

The goal of gender equality is not equal detachment but an equal capacity to experience strong and passionate emotions. Why would that be the case? After all, there is no lack of philosophical or ethical models preaching moderation in all things, and especially in the passions. Although this work rejects entirely the idea that the institutionalization of relations is the only viable framework to organize them, it views the capacity to love in a way that mobilizes the entirety of the self as a crucial capacity to connect to others and to flourish, thus as an important human and cultural resource. The capacity to derive meaning from relationships and emotions, I believe, is better found in those bonds that totally engage the self, enabling it to focus on another person in a way that is self-forgetful (as in the models of ideal parenthood or friendship, for example). Moreover, passionate love dispels the uncertainty and insecurity inherent in most interactions, and in that sense provides a very important source for understanding and enacting what we care about.3 This kind of love radiates from the core of the self, mobilizes the will, and synthesizes a variety of one’s desires. As Harry Frankfurt put it, loving frees us from the constraints and difficulties inherent in the fact of not knowing what to think, and, I would add, what to feel. Passionate love ends that state of indecisiveness, releases us from “the blockage of irresolution.”4 This kind of love is character-building, and ultimately is the only one to provide a compass by which to lead one’s life. The state of indecisiveness about what we love – caused by the abundance of choice, by the difficulty to know one’s emotions by self-scrutiny, and by the ideal of autonomy – prevents passionate commitment and ends up obscuring who we are to ourselves and to the world. For these reasons, I cannot take at face value the cult of sexual experience that has swept over the cultural landscape of Western countries, mostly because I believe such a kind of intensely commodified sexual freedom interferes with the capacity of men and women to forge intense, all-involving meaningful bonds, which provide one with a knowledge of the kind of persons one cares about.

[...] What should be discussed, then, is the question of how sexuality should be made a domain of conduct regulated both by freedom and by ethics. The sexual revolution, anxious to put taboos aside and to reach equality, has by and large left ethics outside the realm of sex. Ultimately, this book suggests that the project of self-expression through sexuality cannot be divorced from the question of our duties to others and to their emotions. We should thus not only stop viewing the male psyche as inherently weak or unloving, but also open for discussion the model of sexual accumulation promoted by modern masculinity and too enthusiastically endorsed and imitated by women; we should also rearticulate alternative models of love, models in which masculinity and passionate commitment are not incompatible and are even synonymous. Instead of hammering at men their emotional incapacity, we should invoke models of emotional masculinity other than those based on sexual capital. Such cultural invocation might in fact take us closer to the goals of feminism, which have been to build ethical and emotional models congruent with the social experience of women. For when detached from ethical conduct, sexuality as we have known it for the last thirty years has become an arena of raw struggle that has left many men and especially women bitter and exhausted.