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. [...]