[...] 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.