Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation

Love is more than a cultural ideal; it is a social foundation for the self. Yet, the cultural resources that make it constitutive of the self have been depleted.

Never really either private or public, the modern self establishes its value through processes that are at once psychological and sociological, private and public, emotional and ritualistic. Clearly, then, in modern erotic/romantic relationships what is at stake are the self, its emotions, interiority, and, mostly, the way these are recognized (or fail to be recognized) by others.

Heterosexual romantic love contains the two most important cultural revolutions of the twentieth century: the individualization of lifestyles and the intensification of emotional life projects; and the economization of social relationships, the pervasiveness of economic models to shape the self and its very emotions.

If the sociologist could hear the voices of men and women searching for love, s/he would hear a long and loud litany of moans and groans.

This is reminiscent of the words by the poet Theodore Roethke, quoted by psychologist Timothy Wilson: “[S]elf-contemplation is a curse/ That makes an old confusion worse.”112 Eugene is waiting for an emotional self-revelation which he cannot achieve through rational introspection because the self is not a “hard,” fixed, knowable entity with clear edges, and with content. The social self is in fact a pragmatic entity, ongoingly shaped by circumstances and others' actions. In engaging in introspection, we try to discover fixed needs or wants, but these needs or wants are being shaped in response to situations. For this reason, introspection interferes with the capacity to feel strong and unmitigated emotions, activated through non-rational cognitive circuits.

The “pornification” of culture takes place in a context of the commodified emancipation of sexual desire and fantasies, free from the shackles of moral regulation. The morality of modern sexuality consists now in affirming mutual freedom, symmetry, and autonomy, rather than in respecting, say, sexual honor or norms of monogamy.

Freedom has been the quintessential trademark of modernity, the rallying cry of oppressed groups, the glory of democracies, the pride of capitalist economic markets, and the reproof to authoritative regimes. It has been and remains the great accomplishment of modern political institutions.

Even the sociologists who conceded that modernity meant progress over ignorance, chronic poverty, and pervasive subjection still viewed it as an impoverishment of our capacities to tell beautiful stories and to live in richly textured cultures. Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.

Will the dwindling of religion and community jeopardize social order? Will we be able to live meaningful lives in the absence of sacredness? In particular, Max Weber was troubled by Dostoevsky's and Tolstoy's questions: If we are no longer afraid of God, what will make us moral? If we are not engaged in and compelled by sacred, collective, and binding meanings, what will make our lives meaningful? If the individual rather than God is at the center of morality, what will become of the ethic of brotherliness that had been the driving force of religions?

Si la sociología oyera la voz de esas mujeres y esos hombres que buscan el amor, llegaría a sus oídos una letanía ruidosa e incesante de quejidos y gruñidos.

El amor apasionado implica dolor y ese dolor no nos debe atormentar. En palabras de Franzen, “el dolor duele pero no mata. Si uno considera la alternativa —un sueño anestesiado de autosuficiencia que la tecnología ampara—, el dolor surge como producto e indicador natural del estar vivo en un mundo que resiste. Vivir una vida entera sin dolor es no haber vivido”.