[...] 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.