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tags:lovesociologyrelationships
Intimacy is no longer — if it ever was — the process of two fully aware subjects entering a contract the terms of which they both know, and agree on.
The disappearance of courtship is a rather striking feature of modern romantic practices and marks a stark difference between contemporary and traditional romantic practices.
In transferring sex to the problematic of temptation, to sin committed in the heart, it transferred sex to the inner realms of thoughts, intentions and private desires.
Conforming to certain codes of behavior, which are based in both class and morality, meant that one deserved to be loved and to love and return. Love was entirely steeped in normativity.
Despite their legendary force, emotions are plagued by the fact they are shifting and volatile. In pre-modern courtship, the exchange of gifts and tokens marked and sealed the intention to each of the partners. “The intention of the giver of the gift had much to do with whether a gift had binding powers”. Gifts were thought to have a magical power, so that to deliver a lock of hair, or even a kiss was to place oneself in another’s possession.
On ritualistic courtship:
rituals are not about cognitions or representations. Rather, they create a dynamic field of energy that binds actors together through the enactment of shared rules and through the shared participation in a hot symbolic reality. Rituals, like norms, define the intensity, boundaries and object of emotions as they reduce uncertainty and ambiguity. Social reality always threatens to lose its order, letting chaos and unpredictability to enter consciousness. Rituals are the device to offset this.
For Niklas Luhmann, love consists of the creation of a shared world of two subjectivities, and moves within fixed and known meanings
One finds oneself desiring an object one can never grasp or possess, or must be confronted by the void and emptiness that the appropriation of such an object would entail. A negative relationship is like looking for someone in an ensemble of people, artifacts, spaces and not finding him or her; it is the feeling of absence and indeterminateness of one’s intentions and desires. A negative relationship… is the perception of an absent other in the midst of the ongoing humming of the presence of many others and the perception of the indeterminateness of my own intentions.
Berenice: I was on the the third date with a guy, I liked him on the first two dates, and then he shows up with this silly, low-class embarrassing shirt, not a stylish-working class shirt, but a shirt his grandfather probably bought in the 1940s in a thrift shop. I thought to myself, either he lacks basic taste or he really doesn’t care about me or he belongs to a different world than mine, like this guy doesn’t know the world. And just like that because of his shirt, I could not feel attracted toward him. I mean not exactly, like that, but I felt it distracted me. I struggled to recover the feelings of attraction. It’s embarrassing to say but the shirt was big turn off.
(fucking hell)
Attraction to someone can easily be put into question when the visual set-up, the spectacle that made it possible disappears. If the consumer objects have no implicit background of attractiveness, they become equated with personhood and create a seamless equivalence between objects and persons, thus suggesting that persons are (d)evaluated as objects.
(interviewee Adam) displays the ways in which women’s sexual attractiveness is used as a form of social and symbolic capital by men who feel evaluated by other men in a competitive field of other men, as sexuality has now become an index of (men’s) social value.
Text describes parcelization of body parts.
the difficult of finding a “fit” because with each encounter, his point of reference and evaluation shifts, making it difficult to attribute worth, ultimately diminishing each one’s worth. This in turn means that we simply do not really know how to evaluate the worth of an object when we are in a market situation of comparing one object to others with a similar value. Moreover “The problem of pricing exemplifies a larger quandary faced by cultural producers, and, for that matter, people in the market of intangibles. It is the problem of uncertainty, the inability to state in advance what one wants.”
(ugh)
There is something exhilarating about swiping right and left. It gives the feeling of power. I think the designers of Tinder work on this feeling. You have a feeling of omnipotence on your romantic destiny. It is a feeling we don’t have in daily life, obviously.
Subjectivity thus seems to be intensified through the capacity to objectify others in an emotionally detached stance, to choose and unchoose as a consumer.
Sex only relationship, with the desire to sway the other to love
Because something in me kept hoping he would fall in love with me. I mean you see someone regularly, you have sex with them, you cook food together, you wake up in the morning together, you make jokes, wouldn’t you feel some kind of closeness after a while to that person?
Ghosting
Wolf Biermann: I can only love when I am free to leave
Exiting is so widespread that it creates ripple effects on the entire way of forming and conceiving relationships.
interviewee: “I suspect on-line dating is to blame for this fast romance, like fast food and fast fashion. The goods are plentiful and easily accessible, but you don’t put too much emotional investment in it. This take on things has spread to other relations as well, so if you meet someone in real life you can try them on for a while and put them back on the shelf without explanation”