I’ve been slowly progressing through this remarkable book over the last couple of years. As an academic work that spans several fields–sociology, economic theory, culture studies, and literary theory (with a smattering of psychoanalysis)–it is fairly dense. So I’ve been picking it up here and there, reading a chapter and then letting it sit for a while. But, despite our casual-seeming relationship, it has certainly been my most recommended book throughout the last couple of years.

I myself am currently living a happily-ever-after type situation, so why would I be reading a book about why love hurts? Well, the first response is that love, while being the subject of this book, is also the incredibly powerful lens through which the author examines social and economic functions. Honestly, I understand more about the free-market economy after having read about how we mate within it. The second response is that most of my friends who are not happily partnered are extremely unhappily participating in various mating rituals that they hate. And they hate them because they are degrading, debasing, unsatisfactory, capitalistic practices that are largely geared toward devaluing women. And that’s a tragedy. And I wanted to know about how that worked, since I also at one time had to go through these bizarre machinations and am left with scars and hauntings of great scope and variety. And the third response is simply that I’m kind of obsessed with love. Always have been, always will be. It comes from reading too much adult fiction in my preteen years but the damage is done and here I am.

So, the book is nominally about love, but it really touches on a range of topics, all related to how humans currently relate to each other in the context of romantic relations.

It is highly pessimistic in tone, as you might expect. Part of Illouz’s “Well, golly, and here we are, stuck in this mire and there’s no going back” attitude may be due to the fact that she is reacting, in large part, to the role of self-help culture and behavioural psychology in getting us into this mire in the first place.

To lend too much of a positive perspective to the situation would be to undercut her argument that a good old-fashioned positive attitude–self-love, self-care, YOLO, you do you–cannot fix social systems designed to torture the humans living within them. So look, it’s glass half empty kind of book. But then I’m a glass half empty kind of gal.

Why Love Hurts is composed of five main chapters, which can also stand alone to a greater or lesser extent, but which all come back to the question of why, in modernity, romantic love has come to be associated with certain specific forms of emotional suffering.

Continue reading “Reading Notes: Why Love Hurts by Eva Illouz” →