By agreeing to be dependent on our partner and not ashamed to be sentimental, even if we are accused of vulgarity, we can avoid love conformity, says sociologist Eva Illuz.
Psychologies: You write that love and sexuality are going through hard times today. Why?
Eva Illuz: We live in an era of emotional uncertainty. Landmarks that allowed fixing love relationships, giving them stability, collapsed in the 1970s. In the XNUMXth century, three spheres of private life were built into each other: sexuality was intertwined with social institutions (family, marriage) and with the love relationship of two. Since the sexual revolution, these three areas have become disconnected from each other, the chronological order of establishing relationships has been reversed: once you had to experience love in order to get sex, today, in order to establish an emotional connection, you need to start with sex. But intimate contacts, when they exist on their own, no longer guarantee the establishment of personal relationships. Sexual «series», that is, the constant change of partners, destabilize the personality. When the relationship exists exclusively as a sexual relationship, then the relationship is perceived as something momentary, temporary, and the question of the form and structure of these relationships does not arise. But the moment attachment comes into play, things get more complicated: we lack social rules, rituals, cultural codes. We have forgotten how to decipher the behavior and intentions of another person and experience incredible difficulties in trying to understand what kind of story we are living now and how the other represents his place in this story: “I have only sex with him?”; Does he have an emotional connection with me? As a sociologist, I see that when we stop understanding the type of situation in which we find ourselves, we do not know what social scenario to follow, what our role and rules of the game are. This uncertainty is worrisome. That is why we are tempted to use «instructions» like those offered in personal growth manuals, or borrow behaviors from bestsellers like «Fifty Shades of Grey»1.
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What are these patterns that can be defined as the new love conformity?
EI: These are actions, the purpose of which is to gain control over the situation, to maintain freedom in search of pleasure. The new love conformity is all about finding any form of relationship that leaves us as free as possible while guaranteeing an inexhaustible source of satisfaction. But we know that it is extremely difficult to reconcile these two opposites: dependence on those we love and autonomy. We fall into the illusion of our own omnipotence: it seems to us that everything depends only on us, on our right decisions and the ability to control our feelings. We have been taught to take care of the conditions of our social existence, and in the same way we must now take responsibility for our own relationships. I remember the success of one English manual called «How to Marry the Man of Your Dreams», very popular in the 1990s. The authors gave supposedly love recipes — for example, «talking with him on the phone, put on an hourglass and hang up before the sand wakes up» — for those cases where, as we know very well, there is no love. The emotional realm is increasingly like a minefield, where individuals meet in their defenselessness to learn to discuss what they depend on each other, while maintaining autonomy, or at least its illusion. We are expected to find our way of functioning in the realm of the senses, but no one tells us that we are actually dealing with a chaos that does not obey any «principles».
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You criticize some modern ideas about love, in which you also see conformity …
EI: We are told about love as some kind of stable state that we either have or don’t have, and which we can identify by regularly asking ourselves about it. It will arise as a religious revelation and immediately cause our appeal: “And then suddenly I understand that I love Isabella” … At this moment, something fundamentally changes in us, and, looking into ourselves, we are supposed to immediately see this undoubted and lasting love. . But love is not arranged like that, it is not a revelation that came down to us once and for all. Our senses work differently! They pierce us. They are confusing and ambiguous. We don’t know how or why relationships work or don’t work for two particular people. And actions aimed at finding out what we «really» feel lead to a dead end, because our relationships develop, and feelings change. The frenzied cult of pleasure and autonomy is perhaps a way to «normalize» feelings.
If love life is so rationed today, does it even make sense to take risks? And what kind of courage could we show?
EI: Courage is not limited to postures or sexual practices, these are no surprises today. The emancipation of the 1970s, and then the media, did a lot of work in the public mind: they sexualized our body and love relationships very much. Pornography, especially with the spread of the Internet, has lifted many prohibitions, made “daring” and borderline practices the norm: the use of sex toys, swinging, sadomasochism. Today, courage is required not in sex, but in the emotional sphere. It consists in abandoning the stereotypes according to which the main thing is sex, and acknowledging your love feelings and impulses, even in their most kitsch and vulgar manifestations. Courage today is to be Emma Bovary.
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What does «kitsch» mean in relation to feelings?
EI: This is sentimentality and lack of shame for its manifestations, faith in strong feelings, the desire for absolute love. In our culture, which celebrates self-reliance, sentimentality is considered a sign of inferiority; we are all afraid of being Emma Bovary. «Kitch» is ostentatious sentimentality, behind the facade of which lies the fantasy of absolute love, which many men and women secretly dream of. Courage is giving ourselves a chance to live stories that allow us to transcend ourselves. It is difficult for us to form close ties because we are afraid that we will suffer or be in bondage. But that’s what love is. This is not a meeting of two autonomous individuals, but a situation in which two see that they are beginning to depend on each other, and agree to this, recognizing that each of the two needs the other.
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1 E. L. James «Fifty Shades of Gray» (Eksmo, 2014).