The End of Love - A sociology of Negative Relationship by Eva Illouz is a collection of sociology study focused on topics of unloving, sexual uncertainty, confusing sex and divorce. Below is my notes when reading Chapter 6. Divorce as a Negative Relationship
The author also wrote the book Why Love Hurts
Divorce
Institutionalization point of view
Emotional ideal face reality.
Maximize individual happiness rather than stabilize social norms
“emotional ontology,”
No Sexual differences in emotional perception
Women no or little “hard-wired” difference with regard to “an emotional brain.”
Narrative of unloving
“In stark contrast with the narrative of falling in love, the least common narrative of unloving is one of epiphany 顿悟, of a revelation, or an understanding in which someone grasps and sees a new aspect of reality.”
“The second form of narrative is one of accumulation: small events and daily conflicts tear progressively the fabric of intimacy.”
“In the third and perhaps most interesting narrative, some events, actions, or words function as “micro-traumatic” events, that is, they mark a rupture—small or large—with one’s moral assumptions, and the subject retrospectively refers to this rupture as an event from which she or he cannot heal or recover. These traumatic events are experienced as breaches of trust, sexual or emotional, and mark wounds defined by the subject as irreparable, that cannot be healed or undone. They are often experienced as a deep assault on the self’s worth and sense of dignity.”
In both stories, the trauma narrative is activated from within a core aspect of the self that feels “betrayed,” “disappointed,” or in some cases “assaulted.”
Sexuality
“Judith Stacey’s classic study of marriage suggests that the modern family provides two things at once: enduring care on the one hand and sexual desire on the other”
“sexuality is a powerful way to organize the narrative of intimacy and the narrative of separation”
“sexual availability has considerably increased the perception of alternatives.”
Commodities as transitional objects
“commodities have become transitional objects around which people organize their emotions and relations”
“they can also become points of repeated, daily tension in relationships, putting into question how and where people define themselves, creating a sense of “cumulative” strain at once centered on petty aspects of daily life and in the deep core of subjectivity.”
“consumer objects and practices make up the chief part of self-narratives, how selves perceive their change and progression”
“Consumer refinement acts as an agent of separateness and seems in turn to be an externalized and objectivized anchor for one’s sense of separateness.”
Autonomy
“men seem to prefer exit to voice, leaving rather than engaging in elaborate emotional negotiations, because “voice”—expressing one’s own needs—is culturally scripted as showing vulnerability and as threatening the boundaries of the self, and hence autonomy.”
“Autonomy and care are two equally intractable ideals of self.”
Emotional Ontologies
Emotion can be embodied. Similar to the commodities mentioned above:
“She conceives of herself as an entity that needs to develop through the cultivation of new tastes and activities, which in turn create new needs, emotional and material, thus changing the terms of the initial contract on which rested her marriage”
Psychological therapy is a common technique to relieve troubles in marriage.
“Therapy has had three effects on intimacy: the first and perhaps most crucial effect of therapy is to have increased awareness and thresholds of self-worth, making anger a legitimate reaction to threats to self-worth and providing techniques to secure it in emotional interactions (being assertive, anxiety-free, or self-loving).”
“The second change is that therapeutic subjects become conscious of their emotions, both repressed and explicit, through a process of labeling”
“Therapy then helps one to undergo a process of refinement of the self and its emotions, making women more aware of their needs and worth.”
Unvoiced accumulation of anger is destructive. “They can only be responded to after an elaborate work of verbalization and negotiation”