family and intimacy

I don’t believe I speak solely for myself when I say that this section, dealing with a more or less universal phenomenon, as Giddens would say, was just so interesting! This phenomenon being amour passion (passionate love): “expressing a generic connection between love and sexual attachment” (Giddens). His social historical analysis of the construction of passionate love, with its gender roles resulting in varying responses to this phenomenon, shows insight into its connection to sexual desire and attachment. I am interested in Giddens’ argument that “romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual’s life – a formula which radically extended the reflexivity of sublime love”; intertwining love with self-narrative. Passionate love then becomes a way of seeing oneself in terms of whom they love romantically, in turn learning as much about their self as they know about the other. This is one way where interest, desire, attachment, love, etc. are institutionalized with institutionalized rituals like wooing, courting, compliments, surprises, flowers, chocolate, love letters, etc.). From romantic comedies, to “the avid consumption of romantic novels and stories” (Giddens), to just thinking of myself and those around me, it has been and still is most often the men that do the romancing with these rituals. I don’t think it was men who started this, but keeping Giddens’ connection of romantic love and self-realization in mind and basing myself on personal experience, I could see how this type of romance does seem to cause more trouble for women, since they are basically taught to expect these things from men. It is the women I know (including myself) who tell stories of the love letters, the compliments, the flowers, and all that nice stuff a boy does, inevitably becoming one of the meanings of romance. I can’t imagine men getting together and getting excited to share all the institutionalized practices they did that day for the woman they are interested in. The institutionalized meaning of romantic love may be great at the beginning of a relationship but it leaves out what really matters for a real happily-ever-after. This leads me into Helen Fisher’s TED talk where she tries to answer the question: what makes a person fall in love with one person and not another? She describes love as an addiction and a need; the god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it is almost impossible to stamp out (Plato). When someone you love dumps you, logically you should want to forget that person. I know I most certainly wanted to! However as Fisher says, we end up wanting the rejecter even more after we’ve been rejected. Wanting what you can’t have seems like much more of a reality than just a saying, and as Fisher says it becomes an obsession; an addiction.