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Love: An Unromantic Discussion

This document summarizes Mary Evans' book "Love: An Unromantic Discussion" which argues that unrealistic expectations of romantic love have preoccupied Western society for the past 200 years and caused personal pain and disruption. Evans references sources from Freud to Faludi to demonstrate how perceptions of love have evolved with social changes like women's liberation. While her prose is generally accessible, she occasionally uses dense academic language. Overall, Evans makes a thoughtful case that society's fixation on romantic illusion comes at the cost of more lasting relationships, though few may be willing to let go of the idea of romantic love.

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Kumar SaTyam
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506 views2 pages

Love: An Unromantic Discussion

This document summarizes Mary Evans' book "Love: An Unromantic Discussion" which argues that unrealistic expectations of romantic love have preoccupied Western society for the past 200 years and caused personal pain and disruption. Evans references sources from Freud to Faludi to demonstrate how perceptions of love have evolved with social changes like women's liberation. While her prose is generally accessible, she occasionally uses dense academic language. Overall, Evans makes a thoughtful case that society's fixation on romantic illusion comes at the cost of more lasting relationships, though few may be willing to let go of the idea of romantic love.

Uploaded by

Kumar SaTyam
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS Love: An Unromantic Discussion Mary Evans Blackwell Publishers 978-0-7456-2073-2 (Dec 20, 2002) What

do Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, and Bridget Jones have in common? They all suffer for love, of course. They also work, for the author, as literary examples of the real-life pain that most people in the Western world experience at one time or another. While unlucky circumstances usually take the blame for this heartache, Evans argues that its not obstacles to love that cause the problem, but the notion of romantic love itself. In this exhaustively researched book, Evans explains how unrealistic aspirations for lovespecifically of the erotic varietyhave preoccupied Western society for the past 200 years. Referencing sources ranging from Sigmund Freud to Susan Faludi, she demonstrates how perceptions of love have evolved over the decades, influenced by social developments including the womens movement and changing attitudes toward sex. Loves one constant quality? It causes big trouble. In addition to the personal pain, theres disruption to society when individuals devote themselves to chasing a romantic illusion at the cost of more lastingand attainableconnections. Dare we entertain the idea of a world without love and could another vocabulary, in which words such as care, commitment and desire were more often used, actually make us happier? Evans writes. Would we, could we, live more fulfilled and contented lives without the emotional state which we describe as love? Evans is a prominent feminist scholar and a professor at the Center for Womens Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury. While her prose is generally crisp and accessible, she does occasionally get carried away with academic-speak, like in this passage, for example: The question to be asked in the following pages is thus about the state of health of love at the beginning of the twenty-first century: is it a redundant concept in a secular, sexually liberalized society or does it still exist, and should we encourage its existence as a necessary, passionate assertion of our humanity against the calculative normality of late capitalism? Fortunately, such lapses are rare.

Evans is not the first to decry the follies of erotic love and will surely not be the last. She does, though, make a thoughtful and compelling argument for loosening the headlock that romance has on societys collective imagination. Not that anyones heart is likely to listen. Karen Holt

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