Mary Evans

A Critical Lens on Romantic Love: A Response to Bernadette Bawin-Legros

f we believe that love is not love which alters when it alteration nds then there is considerable scope for disappointment in the 21st century, since one of our present characteristics would appear to be that we are very quick to nd fault with love, and particularly people we love. As Bernadette BawinLegros points out in her article, we divorce more, change partners more and have higher expectations about the duration of love. Her thesis (in common with Anthony Giddens) is that we are hungry for love in the 21st century and regard the achievement of this state as one of the great entitlements of western modernity. It would appear perverse, at rst sight, to be critical of the idea of the pursuit of love. It sounds like a relatively harmless idea, as ideas go, and one to which it is difcult, if not positively mean spirited to be opposed. Being against love could put a person in a highly undesirable and unattractive community and is tantamount to a rejection of much of great western art, literature and music. But risking the condemnation that is an inevitable part of that anti-love position might allow us to look at love through less than rose-coloured glasses. One of the very convincing sentences in Bawin-Legross article is the statement that Romantic love is a narrative. It would have been useful to pursue that important idea, not least by noting that narratives have endings and one of the characteristics of romantic love narratives is that a lot of them end in tears. From Romeo and Juliet, Abelard and Heloise, Anthony and Cleopatra, to Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky, the famous lovers of literary history come to unhappy and tortuous ends. In the light of an attempt to establish some good practice in love we might ask ourselves why this is the case. The answer to this question is, perhaps, twofold. In the rst place all the
Current Sociology, March 2004, Vol. 52(2): 259264 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0011392104041812

260

Current Sociology Vol. 52 No. 2

great lovers of history fall in love with socially inappropriate people. Society, it seems, is a good deal more powerful than individual inclination. From this revelation we might also note that those critics who deplore the loss of romantic love, and note the rise of an individualism which apparently threatens love could prot by reading a little history. In so doing they would see that the social has always been more powerful than the individual: women and men have tried to love across class, national and ethnic lines, but this has seldom had happy results. Thus when commentators on love note as Bawin-Legros does that the social world articulates ideals incompatible with true love they might pause to consider the long western tradition of precisely this pattern. The ideals which now seem to threaten romantic love are not the same as those which disturbed and thwarted the famous lovers of history, but they were nevertheless social prescriptions and norms. Individualism, despite its name, is a social imperative, just as much as the belief in the maintenance of a class hierarchy or the priority of ties of kin over individual inclination. A second characteristic of the famous lovers of history is that they all wish, in some way, to fuse themselves with their loved one. When the young Catherine, in Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights, cries that I am Heathcliff, she gives voice to the idea that epitomizes romantic love the idea that the individual self has been fused with another to make, we must assume, the persons whole. The psychoanalytic implications of this aspiration are transparent: what these individuals are crying for is the end of the perilous and difcult autonomy of adult life and a return to the heavenly warmth of unity with the mother. If we follow this possible explanation, then romantic love becomes not the great inspirational project of mature love, but an infantile passion for the conditions of immaturity. The loved other as the saviour and as the revival of mother/father has both a history and a presence; a history in the sense that ction (be it literary or otherwise) is littered with women who want strong husbands who can take care of them and men who want wives who can be surrogate mothers and a presence in the sense that current romantic literature and soap opera often endorse. We might, therefore, take a more critical look at the great western narratives about romantic love than we have done in the past. In the light of this, we could be more inclined to see our current expectations about love and romance as evidence of two things: on the one hand, our uncertain steps towards adult love and on the other hand our clinging commitment to an ideal of love which is essentially a part of our emotional past. Giddens suggests that we are moving towards a pure love relationship, in which we can abandon ideas about support, dominance and dependency. This thesis assumes that in the past people married/formed heterosexual relationships in order to secure certain material ends, and that within that relationship there was a poisonous dynamic of male power and female servility. It would be

Evans: Response to Bernadette Bawin-Legros

261

difcult to deny that this dynamic could exist; equally, since Giddens is concerned with both the material and the emotional, it is important to note that throughout much of the West the material situation of women has shifted to allow much greater economic, and personal, freedom. Absent from the discussion by Bawin-Legros is comment on the ways in which these changes impact upon emotional aspirations; neither Bawin-Legros (nor Giddens nor Bauman for that matter) adequately explore the difference that reproductive freedom makes to women. What is left unexplored if this idea is not confronted is the possibility that the obsession, the particularity and the determined singularity of romantic love in the past were part of a world in which paternity and maternity, then an inevitable part of heterosexual sexual relationships, had to be as securely anchored in the social world as possible. Since we broke the association between heterosexual sexuality and reproduction, we have to think about the difference that this makes to us. Many commentators and Bawin-Legros and Giddens are no exception here assume that the origins of the changes that they perceive in attitudes to love, marriage and intimate relationships lie in wider changes in the social world, most notably the increase in what they see as individualism. Two comments are important here; one, the argument that individualism has been part of western culture since the Reformation and second, that western narratives since the 18th century have observed the difculty and complexity of relations between individuals. Nancy Armstrong (1987: 8) wrote that, The modern individual was rst and foremost a woman and that view is, I would argue, a particularly important one. Women writers, of both ction and nonction, have driven the impetus of modernity towards the construction of the essentially urban, social self. But a very important part of that impetus has been made possible by the greater reproductive freedom of women, a freedom which has allowed women to begin the dilution of romantic relationships, which is an increasing characteristic of the 21st century. Romantic love does not necessarily disappear in this world, indeed it can remain and ourish, but it remains and ourishes as a particular form of love and not one which necessarily informs marriage or indeed that more general state of love. The frequent fusion of the ideas of love and romantic love which appears in the article by Bawin-Legros is an all too common part of discussions of love, and a fusion which does little credit to the generations of people who have attempted to live lives of ordinary virtue. Romantic love has been part of western culture for centuries; on that most of us are agreed. But what is seldom also noted is that debunking, scepticism, cynicism and disregard have also been a considerable part of our attitude towards love in its more romantic forms. From the 18th century onwards there has been a vocal tradition of rational investigation about the meaning of romantic love. The examination of the human condition which was encouraged by the

262

Current Sociology Vol. 52 No. 2

Enlightenment began to recognize that romantic love had a considerable genesis in the forbidden. Even though the investigation of the forbidden in Christian history is the beginning of one account of human history, it took some time for people to recognize the general allure of what is proscribed or outlawed. Once that was known, and no reader of, for example, Tolstoy or Jane Austen could fail to see that this had been fully recognized by the end of the 19th century, then romantic love becomes increasingly undesirable. That self-knowledge which the Enlightenment made more possible allows us to begin to examine those ideas such as romantic love which we had once regarded as natural. The process of the denaturalization of love and romantic love which we can recognize (and of which, of course, the work by Bawin-Legros is a part) runs, however, the danger of the exaggeration of the purely contemporary social world. That point has been referred to earlier, but it is an important aspect of discussions of love and one to which it is worth returning. The argument that the contemporary world makes love difcult because of the increasing domination of our lives by autonomy, self-development and even the demands of the market makes of the past a place where people were able to live independent of the social world. Nothing could be further from the reality of most peoples past, a past dominated by hunger, want, disease and scarcity. The post-1945 years of mass consumption and plenty have been a small part of human history and many sociologists assume a continuity between the 21st century and much of the 20th, which is, in material terms, highly misleading. In the past, a collective response to the world offered greater chances of security; for many people today this is still the case, with the difference that individual responses to the world, and agency within it, can assist the collective rather than threaten it. As Bawin-Legros (this issue, p. 250) rightly points out, marriage and couple solidarity remain the best guarantees against precariousness. What needs emphasis here therefore is that the social world and the material world are not the same thing; the material world remains crucial in all our lives, but the social world which we have constructed out of it has changed signicantly in the past 50 years. Crucial to the changes which greater western prosperity has brought to sizeable proportions of the population are the changing relations of women to men, and women and men to children. The information which BawinLegros has collected from Belgium suggests that both women and men aspire to openness and delity in relationships and that a desire for children is important to both sexes. In this, I would suggest that there is little change in the expectations and aspirations voiced about marriage for the past 300 years. But these aspirations take place within a set of new relationships between the sexes, in which neither women nor men have to endorse narratives about romantic love. The new sentimental order (as Bawin-Legros describes it) is therefore a discernible shift in the West, but not one which is necessarily

Evans: Response to Bernadette Bawin-Legros

263

explicable in terms of a shift towards individualism and expectations of intimacy in the ways which Bawin-Legros suggests. The question remains of how we are to assess and explain the new sentimental order. To do that there are both continuities and changes which we have to acknowledge. First we have to recognize that romantic love, with its frequent emphasis on Platonic love and/or suffering, is a specically western idea. This recognition would then allow us to investigate what it is about romantic love in the past that gave it its particular meaning and the way in which it has changed in the past 50 years. I would argue that romantic love has become more explicitly sexualized, as the West has liberalized public discussions of sexuality. Romantic love has also, and this is a paradox of our culture, become more demanding and less beset by moral problems than in the past. Anna Karenina is as deeply concerned with the moral as the characters in the lms Casablanca and Brief Encounter: in all these contexts the idea of relinquishing the loved one is an important part of the narrative. Contemporary narratives of romance seldom include this possibility and what we now identify as individualism in love might well be described as entitlement. Indeed, a critical look at the idea of individualism could be valuable here: it is a word much used by social commentators but its exact meaning and different implications are seldom discussed. Bawin-Legros follows, in her article, much that is conventional about ideas on love. There is, as suggested, the acceptance of romantic love as problematic and the references to the emergence of ideas about autonomy and self-identity. But as she also notes from her ndings, many people maintain the importance of honesty and delity in personal relationships. There is no evidence to lead us to suppose that this was any different in the past, but there is evidence to make us sceptical about the idea of romantic love as the ideal of the past and the absence in that same past of wishes for individualism and autonomy. In different ways, and for different reasons, autonomy in the past was much more difcult to realize for both women and men but there is little reason to suppose that people did not aspire to self-determination with as much energy as anybody in the 21st century. A possible, if less immediately appealing, idea about changes in our attitudes to love in the past 400 years is that we no longer need the kind of romantic love that is sometimes valorized in the past. Changes in the public discussions of sexual relationships in particular by feminists and gay men have initiated the articulation of different forms of love and affection. Arguably these forms were always there, but less well publicly documented. Today, the many possibilities of the forms of love allow us to see orthodox romantic love of the past as one construction among many. We have also, after Freud and Klein, come to recognize more fully the hidden agendas and repetitions of love. A more self-conscious age makes us sceptical about romantic love in new ways, but there is no necessary reason why this should

264

Current Sociology Vol. 52 No. 2

make contemporary engagement with love more fragile, as Bawin-Legros suggests. It is surely not an aspect of fragility to be able to understand more about the ways we relate to one another: indeed, it could be argued that romantic love was always a form of escape from ourselves and that far from deploring its demise we should rejoice in the new possibilities of knowing how, and why, we love.

Reference
ARMSTRONG, Nancy (1987) Desire and Domestic Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.