[...] To be insecure means to feel uncertain about one’s worth, to be unable to secure it on one’s own, and to have to depend on others in order to secure it. One of the fundamental changes in modernity has to do with the fact that social worth is performatively established in social relationships. Another way to say this is to suggest that social interactions – the ways in which the self performs in them – are a chief vector to accrue value and worth to the self, thus making the self crucially depend on others and on its interactions with others. While until the middle or late nineteenth century the romantic bond was organized on the basis of an already and almost objectively established sense of social worth, in late modernity the romantic bond is responsible for generating a large portion of what we may call the sense of self-worth. That is, precisely because much of marriage and romance was solidly based on social and economic considerations, romantic love did little to add to one’s sense of social place. It is precisely the dis-embedding of love from social frameworks that has made romantic love become the site for negotiating one’s self-worth.

[...] Moreover, it is quite possible that what is staged here is simultaneously one’s capacity to criticize oneself (and therefore to display one’s character) and one’s capacity to build intimacy by revealing to another one’s flaws and faults. In displaying their capacity to uphold an ideal of character, and to criticize their own self in the name of that ideal, these women and men stage a self that is not in need of what contemporaries would call “emotional support” or “validation.” This is a self that can perform its own self-evaluation, and which derives a sense of worth not from “being validated” by another but from being held accountable to moral standards and from being improved in order to reach these moral standards. Undoubtedly such rituals of self-depreciation invite ritual protests from the other side; but rather than requests for “validation,” they functioned as “tests” of the man’s resilience and commitment. Here again, it is not the woman’s “self” or need for validation that is at stake, but rather the man’s capacity to display and prove his steadfastness.

He was, well he is a very famous academic. Everyone is in awe of him. Before I met him, I felt I was this invisible, insignificant thing, that no one paid attention to me. I always felt the more stupid one in the room. But when he chose me, when we were having this affair, I felt I had become a very special person, I literally felt smarter, and I could go up to people I would have never dared to talk to, I could talk to them and feel their equal. Even now that it is over, I feel I learned something important about myself, because if he could think I was special, then I felt I was special. I became less afraid of people.

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.