Why Love Hurts (eBook)

Eva Illouz is Rose Isaac Chair of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality. Her previous books include Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism and Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Her book Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery won the American Sociological Association, Culture Section Best Book Award, in 2005.

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

"A bold, thought-provoking book."
Times Higher Education

"An important book ... full of arresting ideas about love in our time"
Los Angeles Review of Books

"A significant achievement, a major analysis of love and an important contribution to sociology. It deserves to have a wide readership wherever love is."
The Australian

"Illouz interrogates the travails of modern love and charts a course through the emotional geography of contemporary feeling ... [This book] will surely prove to make a valuable contribution as an addition to student reading lists, both for the ideas that it puts forward and for the lively debate and heart-felt discussion that it will generate among both women and men."
LSE Review of Books

"Like any sociologist worth her salt, Illouz pushes readers to consider how our experience of love might largely be created by the kind of society we live in. Tracing a sort of history of emotions through archives and literature since the Regency era, she argues that in earlier times people's feelings about love and sentiment were quite different from those we take as self-evident ... It is not our own fault love hurts, Illouz tells us; it is inherent to our modern condition."
Inside Story

"Why Love Hurts is a tour de force, a thrilling read. Unseating the primacy of individual psychology as the reigning explanation for the travails of modern love, and demonstrating the profoundly social nature of our most intimate feelings, Eva Illouz etches a whole new emotional atlas."
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University, and author of Against Love: A Polemic

"Eva Illouz's Why Love Hurts is brilliant - the indispensable book on the social power and meaning of sex and love. And with a bonus: it cuts to the core of the modern emotional condition, all told."
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University

"Eva Illouz's enormous talent to interpret vast empirical material from interviews, statistics, magazines, and novels with sociological imagination and philosophical understanding leads to striking and well-grounded results, such as the increasingly important role of sexiness and physical attraction in choosing mates. A milestone in the investigation of changing patterns of love and marriage."
Axel Honneth, University of Frankfurt and Columbia University

"In this bold and ground-breaking book Eva Illouz argues that there is something qualitatively new in the modern experience of romantic suffering. Readers may not agree with all of Illouz's hypotheses, but none will fail to be provoked by them - and in so doing be forced to challenge their own assumptions about love and modern life itself."
Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum and author of Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists

"Recently named one of the most important thinkers of the future by German newspaper Die Zeit, Illouz could very well be the twenty-first century's next great public intellectual."
Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics

"No one will be able to discuss love without referring to this book."
Die Zeit