The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love

Ann Brooks, Ann Brooks

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000432770
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Études relatives au genre

The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary reference work essential for students and researchers interested in the field of love, romance and popular romance fiction. This first-of-its-kind volume illustrates the broad and interdisciplinary nature of love studies. International contributors, including leaders in their field, reflect a range of perspectives from cultural studies, history, literature, popular romance studies, American studies, sociology and gender studies. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors the Companion is divided into 12 parts:

Love, romance and historical and social change

Love and feminist discourses

Love and popular romance fiction

Love, gender and sexuality

Romancing Australia

South and Southeast Asian romance communities

Nation, place and identity in US popular romance novels

Romantic love and national identity in Chinese and Taiwanese discourses of love

Muslim and Middle Eastern romances

Discourses of romance fiction and technologies of power

Writing love and romance

Legal and theological fiction and sexual politics

This is an important and unique collection aimed at researchers and students across cultural studies, women and gender studies, literature studies and sociology.

Part I Love, romance and historical and social change

1 What's love got to do with it? Romance and intimacy in an age of hooking up

David Shumway

DOI: 10.4324/9781003022343-1

My book, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis, discussed two discourses in which people spoke of love, courtship and marriage in the twentieth century, romance and intimacy (Shumway 2003). I argued that romance was the dominant discourse during the first half of the century, but that in the second half, the discourse of intimacy emerges and to some degree supplants it. The 1990s, however, was the last decade to which I devoted any significant attention in Modern Love, and it seems to me from the perspective of 2020, that neither romance nor intimacy are quite as influential as they once were. In this essay, I want to explore how new practices of sex, courtship and marriage are related to romance and intimacy, and how these new practices have been reflected in popular narratives in film, television and print.

First, a quick reminder about what the discourses of romance and intimacy are and how they have functioned. Romance is a discourse that first emerged in Europe in the late middle ages, where it dealt with love outside of and in opposition to marriage, which was understood as a system of economic and political alliance. By the nineteenth century, this discourse had evolved to be widely understood as the proper basis for marriage. The discourse manifested itself mainly in fictional narratives. Romance may describe chaste courtly love, it may revel in adulterous passion, or it can give an account of an extended courtship ending in a marriage made in heaven, but it cannot tell the story of a marriage. It is in part because of this inability that the discourse of intimacy arose. This discourse, which incorporates the vision of romance as the proper basis for marriage, arose first in the 1950s in the family therapy movement and then a bit later in self-help books promising to improve or save marriages and relationships. It claims to explain how love works. The “relationship” is a key term in this discourse, marking the acceptance of sexual relations outside of marriage. Besides self-help books, the discourse of intimacy was expressed in the films I call “relationship stories” by directors such as Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky and in “marriage fiction” of writers such as John Updike and Alison Lurie.

Since 2000, it seems as though the discourse of intimacy has receded somewhat. John Gray’s advice book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, was one of biggest selling books of the 1990s, and the publishing of relationship advice books was a sales phenomenon. These kinds of books continue to be published, of course, but they are much less prominent now. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a revival of the romantic comedy in cinema, which produced box-office hits such as Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1976), When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989) and Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990). In the first two decades of this century, the percentage of income the movie industry derived from romantic comedies has dwindled, and there have been very few notable additions to the genre. Especially interesting is the decline of “relationship stories” such as Annie Hall or An Unmarried Woman (Paul Mazursky, 1978) which often lack the happy ending typical of most romantic comedies. Similarly, the marriage fiction of Updike and Lurie has not been followed by prominent novels in this mode by younger writers. Television, especially premium and streaming services, however, has to an extent made up for these absences, suggesting that the appeal of these popular genres remains.

Before we get to examining some representative instances, we need to discuss how practices and norms have shifted over the past two decades. In 2003, when I published Modern Love, same-sex marriage was not recognized anywhere in the United States, and recent legislation, such as the “Defense of Marriage Act”, was designed to forestall it and to reinforce traditional conceptions of marriage. Between 2004, when Massachusetts enacted a same-sex marriage law to 2015, when the Supreme Court declared that the Constitution required same-sex marriage to be recognised nationally, state laws and public opinion increasingly accepted the validity of same-sex marriage.

In the late 1990s, there was an attempt by right-wing social scientists to create a national panic about the declining marriage rate and the continuing prevalence of divorce. After a few years, this campaign receded, despite the fact that the marriage rate did not increase. Indeed, the marriage rate continued to decline. According to the Pew Research Center, “Half of Americans ages 18 and older were married in 2017, a share that has remained relatively stable in recent years but is down 8 percentage points since 1990”. One reason for this is that people are marrying later. “The median age at first marriage had reached its highest point on record: 30 years for men and 28 years for women in 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau”. Divorce rates on the whole seem to have stabilised at around 50%, but the number of older couples getting divorced has been growing (Geiger and Livingston 2019).

The percentage of people who remarry has increased, and this suggests that marriage remains a valued state despite the above statistics. Pew found that the two most popular answers to the question what is a very important reason to get married were “love” and “making a life-long commitment”. Practical reasons such as having children and financial stability were cited by much smaller percentages (Geiger and Livingston 2019). These answers suggest that the influence of romance and intimacy discourses continues to be significant. Marriage continues to be understood primarily as something undertaken for reasons of personal desire or satisfaction, and not for the social good or for economic convenience.

The delaying of marriage beyond what is normally considered late adolescence, however, is a major change that is certainly related to the emergence of several patterns of more casual sexual relationships, “friends with benefits” and “hooking up”, among college-age Americans. While sexual activity during early adolescence – prior to the age of 18 – has been declining, and teen pregnancy along with it, only a small percentage of Americans delay sexual activity until after marriage. If they aren’t going to marry until the age of 30, they are unlikely to understand sexual activity in their college years as courtship, the way it was mainly understood at least from the late 1960s on. It follows that they must find other forms for sexual relationships to take, and that these relationships must be more casual.

“Hooking up” seems to be a new name for a practice that is not itself new. Previously, the practice went by the name “one-night stand” and by the late 1960s, it was not unfamiliar to most college-age men and women. Casual sex certainly became more common in the 1960s, and the decline of dating begins then. However, casual sex was disparaged by many, and the double-standard made women who participated in it suspect. Also, a one-night stand might well be the result of a date, or an encounter at a party or bar, and they were not understood as an alternative to dating. Hooking up is now understood as what young people do instead of dating, casual encounters often beginning out of activities undertaken in groups or initiated through an app (Rosenbloom 2007). Of course, a hook-up can lead to a relationship, but the point of the new term is to emphasize that it is not expected to do so.

The phrase “friends with benefits” is also a new name for an older practice, but one that was previously much less common among young people. In this practice, people who do not have romantic feelings for each other and who are explicitly not courting, have a continuing relationship that includes sex (Carey 2007). Older adults, especially those previously married – had had such arrangements for years, and after the 1960s, they became more common. They were rare among college-age people, however, who commonly maintained a sharp distinction between friendship and sexual relationships. That distinction is the comic premise of When Harry Met Sally, which begins with its protagonists sharing a ride from the University of Chicago to New York, and arguing about whether men and women can be friends. Later, after Harry and Sally do become friends, the opposition between the two seems to be affirmed when sex seems to kill their friendship. The film’s romantic conclusion, reverses that judgement, but without overturning the distinction between friendship and a relationship.

The increased frequency of sex between people who describe their bond as friendship is another sign that the range of commonly practiced sexual behaviour is expanding. There does not seem to be hard evidence about just how common “hooking up” and “friends with benefits” are, but reporting is sufficient to convince us that the phenomena are real. And, they fit perfectly with the fact that marriages are now being delayed beyond adolescence. Instead of courting, young people have invented other forms in which to have sex. Sex and marriage, then, are continuing to be less dependent on each other, a process that began after World War II in what Anthony Giddens identified as a “transformation of intimacy” (Giddens 1992).

It is not surprising that popular culture has had trouble taking account of these changes. The paradigm for romantic comedy was invented in ancient Greece, and it endures even today despite the numerous forms that love and marriage have taken since then. There is a conservative character to the plot forms typical of narratives presented in mass media. That includes the novel, although print fiction shows somewhat greater diversity than do movies and television. Nevertheless, we can find some works in each of these media that register changes in love, sex, courtship and intimacy since 2000. Often, these are to be found within the frame of older forms, and they remain limited by the commercial imperatives of the media in which they are presented.

It is also, perhaps, not surprising that the oldest genre dealing with these issues is the one that seems to have suffered most in recent years. During Hollywood’s studio era of the 1930s and 1940s, romantic comedies were a staple genre. While they declined in importance in the 1950s and 1960s, the 1970s saw a revival that lasted into the 1990s. Since 2000, however, romantic comedy in all of its variations has become less common and less interesting. Of the top-grossing romcoms since 1995, none were made later than 2009, and 10 were released before 2000. The share of box-office revenue generated by romantic comedies declined from a high of 9.85% in 1999 to a low of 0.66% in 2015. From 1995 to 1999, romantic comedies averaged 6.984% of yearly box office, while from 2014–2019, they averaged 1.668% (The Numbers 2020). Now this change is partly explicable by changing production trends. Fewer romantic comedies were produced as the studios increasingly focused on franchises, to which the genre does not lend itself. Successful theatrical releases have increasingly been aimed at children and adolescent boys, with romcoms written off as “chick flicks”.

Moreover, since 2000, it is hard to find romantic comedies that standout aesthetically or culturally. Indeed, many of the films so classified merely use the form of the genre, while focusing their attention elsewhere – for example, on gross-out humour. One trend that is worth remarking is the emergence of romantic comedies dealing with older couples. These films reflect the increasing rates of remarriage and cultural awareness that older people continue to want sex and love. One of these was Juliet Naked (Jesse Peretz, 2018) based on Nick Hornby’s novel about an aging former rock star who finds love with the estranged partner of his biggest fan. Hornby is the great chronicler of what Giddens calls men’s failure to adapt to the transformation of intimacy (Giddens 1992). Hornby’s men often think of themselves more broadly as failures, while his women are stable and successful. Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), the protagonist of this film, becomes a grandfather before he is able to recognise the value of intimacy.

Nancy Meyers has made older romance something of a specialty, with Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and It’s Complicated (2009). The first of these pairs, Harry (Jack Nicholson) and Erica (Diane Keaton), and he suffers a heart attack while involved with her daughter. While the triangle here is a reversal of the famous one in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), that Harry was seeing her daughter doesn’t turn out be the major obstacle. Rather it is that Nicholson, in what Roger Ebert called “a quasi-autobiographical role”, plays a man notorious for dating and not marrying much younger women (Ebert 2003). It’s his brush with mortality that teaches Harry the value of intimacy, which the movie makes clear through dialogue.

It’s Complicated is more interesting because it is a comedy of failed remarriage. It features Meryl Streep as Jane, who while attending her son’s college graduation sleeps with her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin) who has since remarried. Jake’s relationship with his much younger wife is not going so well, and he finds sex with Jane is unexpectedly wonderful. If this were a screwball comedy, this would be the first step toward their remarriage. Instead, the film introduces another eligible mate, Adam (Steve Martin), whom the film suggests is a much better match for Jane. Where screwball comedies once tried to provide reassurance in the face of rising divorce rates by showing us couples who made the right choice to begin with, now romantic comedies show us that we can find love, even in late middle age, with new partners.

Several recent romantic comedies have tried to address the new patterns of sexual activity among young people. The best of these, Friends with Benefits (Will Gluck, 2011), takes the title concept mainly as a comic premise, and we have a strong suspicion from the start that Dylan (Justin Timberlake) and Jamie (Mila Kunis) will end up as more than just friends. They have both had bad luck with previous relationships, and they agree to have sex with each other as long as it remains strictly physical. Since they have met quite recently, this arrangement is not typical of the practice usually described and there is nothing special about their friendship – unlike the one Harry and Sally had. The presence of her mother and his father in the film, make it a quite traditional romantic comedy, although the discourse of intimacy is invoked to explain why the couple is in fact right for each other. Another film that uses “friends with benefits” as its premise is No Strings Attached (Ivan Reitman, 2011). Here the friendship between Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Aston Kutcher) is a revival of one they had in childhood, but they haven’t kept in touch. Thus, their sexual relationship is also posed as a kind of experiment – can two people have sex and not fall in love – undertaken because neither of them have time for the commitments of love. Here the demands of the genre seem particularly obvious, and the film quickly leaves the experiment behind. The only way that “hooking up” might be useful in a romantic comedy is as the beginning of some other arrangement, and several romcoms have invoked it in just this way. Sleeping With Other People (Leslye Headland, 2015), has its central couple hookup once and then meet later in a sex-addicts support group. Two Night S...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Love, romance and historical and social change
• Part II: Love and feminist discourses
• Part III: Love and popular romance fiction
• Part IV: Love, gender and sexuality
• Part V: Romancing Australia
• Part VI: South and southeast Asian romance communities
• Part VII: Nation, place and identity in US popular romance novels
• Part VIII: Romantic love and national identity in Chinese and Taiwanese discourses of love
• Part IX: Muslim and Middle Eastern romances
• Part X: Discourses of romance fiction and technologies of power
• Part XI: Writing love and romance
• Part XII: Legal and theological discourses and sexual politics
• Index