More from Eva Illouz’s outstanding essay. Illouz goes on to look at the modern statement of disenchantment and what it does to romantic relationships. Our need to understand everything in terms of enlightened rationality pushes us attempt to understand the phenomenon of falling in love in largely psychological, psychoanalytic, or biological terms. These scientific explanations “undermine the view of love as an ineffable, unique, and quasi-mystical experience, ultimately undermining both its absoluteness and uniqueness.”
Love no longer becomes ineffable and mystical because when you fall in love, you’re really either reliving an early developmental psycho-drama, or you say someone that flooded you with a combination of dopamine and testosterone and host of other biochemical treats, or you’re falling prey to thousands of years of evolutionary development and your genes have told you the one in front of you is the one who can best guarantee their survival. Love falls prey to the scientific rationality just like every other sphere of life:
Scientific modes of explanation, psychological, biological, evolutionary, by their nature tend to be abstract and extraneous to the categories of felt and lived experience. In contrast, premodern religious explanations that viewed intense love as the manifestation of spirit possession or as a temporary loss of Reason still resonated with the felt experience of the subject. Scientific explanations reduce love to an epiphenomenon, a mere effect of prior causes that are unseen and unfelt by the subject, and that are neither mystical nor singular but rather located in involuntary and almost mechanical, psychic or chemical, processes. With the prevalence of scientific modes of explanation, it is difficult to hold onto the view of love as a unique, mystical, and ineffable feeling. In that sense, love has undergone the same process of disenchantment as Nature: it is no longer viewed as inspired by mysterious and grand forces but rather as a phenomenon in need of explanation and control, as a reaction determined by psychological, evolutionary, and biological laws…The overall effect of scientific interpretive frameworks on love is both deflationary and reflexive. They dethrone love of its transcendental status, making it instead a psychological or physical force, working beyond and beneath the concrete particular experiences of specific individuals. They also create a strong unreality effect, making actors doubt love’s reality and explicitly attend to the underlying real causes for their love. [emphasis mine]
Add to all this scientific reductionism of love the phenomenon of the internet and things really get interesting, or depressing depending on your point of view.
In premodern cultures mate selection involved a lot fewer choices. Most people weren’t incredibly mobile, so they had limited partners to choose from. They often would up picking the first good candidate, with good being determined by a host of criteria including “dowry size, a candidate’s personal or family wealth and reputation, education, and family politics.” But again, with few options, the standards weren’t nearly as high, nor were the expectations of the relationship. And now…
Two main differences in the modern situation strike even the casual observer: the premodern actor looking for a mate seems a simpleton in comparison with today’s actors, who from adolescence to adulthood develop an elaborate set of criteria for the selection of a mate. Such criteria are not only social and educational, but also physical, sexual, and perhaps most of all emotional. Psychology, internet technology, and the logic of the capitalist market applied to mate selection have contributed to create a self-conscious, manipulable personality, who uses an increasingly refined and wide number of criteria, presumably conducive to greater compatibility. Psychology in particular has greatly contributed to defining persons as sets of psychological and emotional attributes, themselves submitted to the imperative of compatibility. Thus what has become a hyper-cognized, rational method of selecting a mate goes hand-in-hand with the expectation that love provide authentic, unmediated emotional experiences.
So we go through a rigorous scrutinizing process to select our potential partner, one more rationalistic than anything in history, and yet once we find the partner we want to settle down with, we expect that we will have “authentic, unmediated emotional experience” the kind that flow from a less rationalistic and more mystical understanding of love itself.
Now consider the $900 million dollar online dating industry:
By enabling users to investigate a vast number of options, the internet encourages the maximization of partner selection in unprecedented ways, in stark contrast to the methods of premodernity. Maximization of outcome has become a goal in and of itself. For example, many respondents to an open-ended questionnaire about the uses of Internet dating sites declared the choices available were so large that they would get in touch only with people who corresponded very precisely to their diverse aspirations. Moreover, the majority of respondents reported that their tastes changed in the course of their search and that they aspired to more accomplished people than they did at the beginning of the search. Clearly the case of online dating shows that actors use elaborate rational strategies to achieve their romantic desires, thus confirming Smelser’s and Alexander’s claims that computer technology has a strong rationalizing effect: the gradual permeation of the computer into the pores of modern life deepened what Max Weber called the rationalization of the world.
Once again, the process of selecting a partner for a romantic relationship is completely disenchanted. It is as rationalistic and technologized as anything else in modern culture. And yet out of such a process we expect some ineffable and mysterious that is exceedingly emotionally gratifying.
Earlier on in the essay Illouz quotes Sex in the City’s Candace Bushnell, as she epitomizes the contemporary approach to love:
When was the last time you heard someone say, “I love you!” without tagging on the inevitable (if unspoken) “as a friend.” When was the last time you saw two people gazing into each other’s eyes without thinking, “Yeah right?” When was the last time you heard someone announce, “I am truly, madly in love,” without thinking, Just wait until Monday morning?
Bushnell expresses, “a thoroughly self-conscious, supremely ironic, and disenchanted approach to love.” And when she expressed it, we all probably have a sense for what she means. This is because, in Illouze’s eyes, we are steeped in a rationalistic culture that drowns us in irony. Irony “is the trope of the person who knows too much but refuses to take reality seriously.” “Modern romantic consciousness” is thus thoroughly ironic “because it is saturated with knowledge, but it is a disenchanted knowledge that prevents full belief and commitment.” If indeed “love” is a modern religion as Illouze claims, presumably because we approach the search for it despite all the rationalization with the unswerving devotion of a zealot, “it is a peculiar one indeed, for it is a religion that cannot produce belief, faith, or commitment.”