Why Love Hurts Why Love Hurts A Sociological Explanation Eva Illouz polity Copyright © Eva Illouz 2012 The right of Eva Illouz to be identifi ed as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2012 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6152-0 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction: The Misery of Love 1 2 The Great Transformation of Love or the Emergence of Marriage Markets 18 3 Commitment Phobia and the New Architecture of Romantic Choice (with Mattan Shachak) 59 4 The Demand for Recognition: Love and the Vulnerability of the Self 109 5 Love, Reason, Irony 156 6 From Romantic Fantasy to Disappointment 198 7 Epilogue 238 Notes 249 Index 282 Acknowledgments In more than one way, I started writing this book in my head many years ago, while still an adolescent. It is the product of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of conversations with close friends and strangers that left me perplexed and puzzled by the chaos that pervades con- temporary romantic and sexual relationships. Why is it that despite their strength and autonomy, women in the four countries in which I have lived during my adult life (France, the United States, Israel, and Germany) are baffl ed by the elusiveness of men? Why do men seem to have become a puzzle and an ongoing source of bemusement for women? And did the men and women of the past agonize about love in the same way as modern men and women do? Most of the surrounding culture instructs us to answer these questions by looking for the hidden history of our fl awed childhood and to explain the disarray of romantic lives with fl awed psyches. This book wants to question this largely unquestioned assumption. It wants to explain why love hurts by highlighting the social, rather than the psychologi- cal, context of men’s and women’s encounters. This book, then, emerges from the intimacy of many hours of conversation, but it owes much to other, less intimate but no less important, conversations. My fi rst thanks go to the Wissenshaftskol- leg zu Berlin, which during the 2007–8 year provided the peace and quiet of a monastery and the intense conversations of an eigh- teenth-century salon. I thank Dale Bauer, Ute Frevert, Sven Hillerkamp, Axel Honneth, Tom Laqueur, Reinhart Merkel, Reinhart Meyer- Kalkus, Susan Neiman, John Thompson, and Eitan Wilf for engaging me so compellingly in their thoughts, questions, and often brilliant viii Acknowledgments suggestions. Mattan Shachak has been entirely necessary to the process of writing this book; he has made tangible on a daily basis the joy of being the teacher of an outstanding student and research assistant. Ori Schwarz, Dana Kaplan, and Zsuza Berend have read many chapters; their comments have been crucial in helping me sig- nifi cantly improve the book. I thank them for their remarkable intel- lectual generosity. Nathalie-Myriam Illouz, my sister and a brilliant psychoanalyst, and Beatrice Smedley, my friend and fellow-writer, have endlessly discussed with me the splendor and misery of love. I can only hope to emulate the subtlety of their analyses. A book is a special kind of commodity: it must be not only pro- duced by expert heads and hands, but also believed in. Polity Press is unique in its dedication to furthering the global circulation of ideas, and in its intimate, intense care in the process of producing a book. I am privileged to have seen this book endorsed so wholeheartedly by John Thompson. The depth of his care and the precision of his responsiveness make him an exceptional publisher. Justin Dyer has been a superb editor, and Jennifer Jahn and Clare Ansell have been most responsive and helpful as editorial assistant and production editor, respectively. I thank all the people, close friends and strangers, who confi ded in me and told me their stories, sometimes in despair, often in hope and trust. I dedicate this book to the men and the women I will keep loving for a long time, painlessly and painfully. The publishers would like to acknowledge the following for permis- sion to reproduce the epigraphs: From INDIGNATION by Philip Roth. Copyright (c) 2008, Philip Roth, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited; Chris Carter, www.catchhimandkeephim.com; From DISGRACE by J.M. Coetzee, copyright (c) 1999 by J. M. Coetzee. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and of Vintage, a division of Random House; From LOVE, ETC. by Julian Barnes, copyright (c) 2000 by Julian Barnes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; published by Vintage Books. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd;