Why love hurts / Eva Illouz

[...]my aim is to do to love what Marx did to commodities: to show that it is shaped and produced by the cocrete social relations; to show that love circulates in a marketplace of unequal competing actors; and to argue that some people command greater capacity to define the terms in wich they are loved than others. p. 6 

In contrast, when the self becomes essentialized, when love is defined as addresing the innermost essence of the person, not his/her class and position, love becomes a direct bestowal of value on the person, and a rejection becomes a rejection of the self. p.34

The attraction to someone becomes subject to reasons that are not cognitively, consciously or raionally justifiable, p.50

She suggests that "[male] culture was (and is) parasiti cal, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reci. procity. -59 In this view, then, boys/men are "emotional parasites": that is, they can take love, but not generate or return it to provide the kind of emotional sustenance women need. Following this line of thought, commitment phobia can be viewed as an aspect of "com pulsory heterosexuality," one of the main institutionalized descriptions of the ways in which women are systematically humiliated, dismisswd, and ignored by men. p. 70

if men can choose younger, less affluent, less educated partners, this implies simply that the samples they can choose from are much larger. These facts combined gener ate a discrepancy in the size of the samples available to both sexes, with the result that educated women have fewer men to choose from. p.77

Blackburn comments that "lovers are not literally blind. They do see each other's celluline, warts, and squints but the strange thing is that they do not mind them and might even find them enchanting." Such forgiveness is intrinsic to love and has the result of making the object of love (temporarily) value him/herself more markedly. P.111

Thus, many of the difficulties at the beginning of relationships derive from nego tiation over autonomy and recognition: how much autonomy and recognition one should display and receive constitutes the crux of the emotional negotiation in an early relationship. p.132

I think there are these power games men and women play. I have thought about it a lot. I think men and women's relationships are fucked up to the core, because it is as if men can be truly interested in a woman only if she is distant from them, or withdraws something from them, or something like that. If a woman expresses neediness, anxieties, desire for closeness, then forget it, the man will just not be there. It is as if the man needs to prove to himself he can win her over and over again. p. 141

Middle-class heterosexual women are thus in the odd his torical position of having never been so sovereign in terms of their body and emotions, and, yet, of being emotionally dominated by men in new and unprecedented ways. p.239