Sociology of Love

ROMANTIC MARKET
Ø What is the language and sign of Love?
Ø How is love express?
Ø Is love omnipresent?
Ø What does classical sociologists say about
love ?
Ø Is love a social phenomenon?
Eros (erotic
love) Agape
(unconditional Anders Nygren (1953)
love)

Eros (erotic
love) Agape
(unconditional
love)
CS Lewis (1960)

Storge
(affection)
Philia (friendship)
 Family love:
Mark of duty & Passionate love:
social morality Emile Durkheim
Free love and
private sensibilities

‘The man and the woman seek in this union [i.e., the passionate love of the romantic couple]
their own pleasure and the society they form depends exclusively, at least in principle, on
their elective affinities. They associate with one another because they like each other,
whereas brothers and sisters are forced to like each other since they are associated within the
family’ (Durkheim 1897: 61).
 Universality: all human beings, seen as united by a universal
communion of suffering.

Ideal Type of brotherly love

Ethical personalism: it promotes an intense personal preoccupation
for each and every sufferer.
(Max Weber)
Acosmism (world denial): a radical rejection of the world based on the
latter’s inherent flaws.

Tensionalism: implies the existence of an essential tension between

brotherly love and other spheres of the social world.

Inner-worldly intransigence: expresses through a refusal to come to

terms with the world.

‘The brotherly ethic of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force
of life: sexual love’ (Weber 1946: 343).
Sorokin (1950): Love as an energic force that has the transformative power to remould human
Personality and society alike.
 Cognitive beliefs: several (irrational) beliefs, or cognitive biases, regarding

‘Romantic Love Complex’

the nature of love of one’s romantic partner. The random nature of love or
fatality of love or the unique romantic qualification.
Parsons (1955)
Emotional states: love is a universal remedy for all problems. The
idealisation of the romantic partner.

Normative expectation: the institutionalization of romantic love in

marriage.

The Romantic Market: Despite its open and free nature, is nevertheless structurally self-regulating
So as people fall in love with and end up marrying the people they are supposed to do so, in terms
of class, race, ethnicity, religion, caste and socio-economic status (Goode, 1959).

Ø Parsons sees extramarital love a danger to the social order endorsed by the institution of marriage
whereas Weber sees as the possibility of an erotic escape from the iron cage of conjugality.
Love: It not only profoundly shapes people’s subjective and emotional realms, but

Ø Love has structural importance.

Ø Intrinsic connection with the institution of marriage in modern societies.
Ø Love is a factor that has an impact on the social structure, social stratification and the
structural reproduction of society (Goode 1959).
Ø Love continues to be used as the legitimating ideology for family, relationships and
marriage (Jackson 1993).
 A background in Love
Ø Western society is now ‘detraditionalized, non-religious and individualized’, love is a blank
space that couples themselves have to fill in (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995, 2005).
Ø Falling in love ‘constitutes a personal and social revolution (Langford, 1999)
Ø Love is now embedded in and inseparable from consumer capitalism (Illouz (1997).
Ø The love that we are told exists through its commercialization, and the reality of social
experience where love can be fleeting and hurtful (Hochschild 2003).
Ø Love as ‘till death do us part’ is out of fashion and love now is represented by temporary
liaisons, short flings and one night stands (Bauman 2003).
Ø Current society embracing ‘confluent love’, which involves ‘opening oneself out to the other
(Gidden 1992)
Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (Eva Illouz 2012)
• The will (how we want something)
• Recognition (what matters for our sense of worth)
• Desire (what we long for and how we long for it)
Ø Pain stemming from an investment in romantic love as an effect of the cultural frameworks which
define the social roles, identities and emotional scripts involved in making erotic choices.
Ø Gendered dimension of pain:
• The cultural codes defining romantic love in hyper modernity create multiple predicaments in
women’s live.
• Men are more successful than women in defining the criteria of lovability which secures them
a privileged position in the sexual field or the marriage market.
• Women who take an interest in family life and reproduction are constrained by their
biological clock.
Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (Eva Illouz 2012)
• ‘When relationships do get formed, agonies do not fade away, as one may feel bored,
anxious, or angry in them; have painful arguments and conflicts; or, finally, go through the
confusion, self-doubts, and depression of break-ups or divorces (…) Despite the
widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they
are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches’ (:3).

• The individual navigates their way through complex social structures and institutions
which frame the rules around and cultural rituals of love, drawing on the resources which
they have personally accumulated.
 Kinship System
Ø Refers to set of persons recognized as relatives either by blood relationship or by
virtue of a marriage.
• Consanguinity: all blood relationship.
• Affinity: All relationships through marriage.
Ø Descent Approach:
• Patrilineal: where descent is trace in the male line from father to son.
• Matrilineal: where descent is trace in the female line from mother to daughter.
• Double (duolineal or bilineal): traced in both the father’s as well as mother’s line.
• Ambilineal: descent wherein as person can choose the kingroup to affiliate with.
Ø Alliance Approach: Kinship includes that consideration of the patterns and rules of
marriage.
Kinship Diagrams

Refers to a male

Refers to a female

Refers to dead

Refers to dead

Relationship between
 Marriage
Ø Social institution legally ratified union, culture, religion, normally of a man and a
woman.
Ø Socially acknowledged and approved sexual union between two adult individual
(Giddens 2006).
• Societies vary considerably in rules and methods for selecting marriage partners.
• Pre-modern societies: marriage is used as a way of creating advantageous links
between families, clans, and royal household; personal attraction and sexual and
emotional satisfaction.
• Modern societies: marriage is usually a free choice though it remains the case that
most people tend to choose partners who are share similar religion, class,
educational background, caste etc.
 r ora l
So gyny
ly
Po
Types of Marriage Non-
Sororal
Polygyny
l
te rna
Fra

Monogamy Marriage Polyandry Non-

Fraternal

Group
Marriage
 Why Polyandry?
Ø Desire to prevent division of property within a family (especially in fraternal
polyandry).
Ø Desire to preserve the unity and solidarity of the sibling group.
Ø The need for more than one husband in a society where men are away on a
commercial or military journey.
Ø A difficult economy, especially an unfertile soil, which does not favour division of
land and belonging (Peter 1968).
 Patterns of Marriage
Ø Endogamy
Ø Exogamy
Ø Arrange Marriage
Ø Love or Inter-caste marriage
Ø Bride-Price
Ø Practice of Dowry

Ø In premodern Europe marriage usually began as property arrangement, was in its middle mostly about
raising children, and ended about love. In most of the modern West, marriage begins about love, in its
middle is still mostly about raising children (if there are), and ends-often about property, by which point
love is absent or a distant memory (Boswell 1995).
 Family
Ø Refers to the group comprising parents and children.
Ø Group of relatives and their dependents forming one household.
Ø Family as an agent of socialization.
1. Nuclear family: refers to a couple with or without children.
2. Joint family: the nuclear family plus all kin belong to the side of husband, and/or
wife living in one homestead. The joint family consists of a man and his wife and
their adult sons, their wives and children, and younger children of the paternal couple.
• Commensality
• Common residence
• Joint ownership of property
• Cooperation and sentiment
• Ritual Bonds
 Theoretical Perspectives on Family
1) Functionalism
• Society as a set of social institutions that perform specific functions to ensure
continuity and consensus.
• Family contribute to society’s basic needs and helps to perpetuate social order.
Ø Primary socialization
• The process by which children learn the cultural norms of the society into
which they are born.
Ø Personality Stabilization
• The role that the family plays in assisting adult family members emotionally
(Parsons 1956).
• Justify domestic division of labour between men and women as something natural and
unproblematic.
2) Feminist Approaches
Ø Challenge the vision of family as a harmonious and egalitarian realm.
Ø Examine the experiences of women in the domestic sphere.
Ø Question the presence of unequal power relationship within the family.
Ø Symmetrical family: the belief that, over time, families are becoming more
egalitarian in the distribution of roles and responsibilities.
Ø Paid and unpaid work realms of family.
Ø Distribution of resources among family members and the patterns of access to and
control over household finances.
Ø Unequal power relationship within a family (wife battering, marital rape, sexual
abuse of children etc.).
Ø Caring activities and emotion work
3) Marxist Perspective on the Family
Ø Nuclear family emerged with capitalism and private property and perform ideological
functions for capitalism (it socialize people to think in a way that justifies inequality
and encourages people to accept the capitalist systems as fair, natural and
unchangeable).
Ø The family acts as a unit of consumption (the family build demands for goods in a
numbers of ways) and teaches passive acceptance of hierarchy.
Ø Institution where wealth is pass down and reproduce class inequality.