Romantic Intimacy

How much can we know about what other people are feeling and how much can we sympathize or empathize with them? The term "intimacy" captures a tension between a confidence in the possibility of shared experience and a competing belief that thoughts and feelings are irreducibly private. This book is an interdisciplinary study of shared feeling as imagined in eighteenth-century ethics, romantic literature, and twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Original interpretations of Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Austen show how mutual recognition gives way to the appreciation of varied, nonreciprocal forms of intimacy. The book concludes with accounts of empathy and unconscious communication in the psychoanalytic setting, revealing the persistence of romantic preoccupations in modernity. Yousef offers a compelling account of how philosophical confidence in sympathy is transformed by literary attention to uneven forms of emotional response, including gratitude, disappointment, distraction, and absorption. In its wide-ranging and eclectic engagement with current debates on the relationship between ethics, affect, and aesthetics, the book will be crucial reading for students of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, as well as for literary theorists.

“A beautifully written and well-researched cultural criticism as well as an honest memoir” (Los Angeles Review of Books) from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy. What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer. In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, “Catron melds science and emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation” (Bookpage). She delves back to 1944, when her grandparents met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from. And she tells the story of how she decided to test an experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. “Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us” (Booklist), How to Fall in Love with Anyone flips the script on love. “Clear-eyed and full of heart, it is mandatory reading for anyone coping with—or curious about—the challenges of contemporary courtship” (The Toronto Star).

This book explores the meaning of love and intimacy from a variety of perspectives, specifically philosophical, psychological and cultural. This volume is a focussed study on what makes them and what may break love and intimacy. Love and intimacy are central to us, is sought by almost everyone, and while we seem to know what they are, they are not easily described. The present volume includes eleven chapters which are divided into two parts. The first part describes the meaning of love, intimacy, and romantic relations, and the second highlights what may go wrong in such relationships, and why. The book explores theoretical debates and contemporary research around emotions and will be of interest to students and researchers of psychology, philosophy as well as sex, marriage and family therapists and counselors. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Journal of Psychology.

Love, Intimacy and Online Dating: How a Global Pandemic Redefined Romantic Relationships is an innovative work that explores the concept of intimacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book provides an overview of the online dating world and apps, the use of which gradually became common as the pandemic restricted people’s interaction in the physical world. The author’s extensive research conducted during the pandemic posits a comprehensive understanding of the individual’s motivation to join a dating app and explores its varied aspects. This thoroughly researched book explores the themes and elements of online dating and examines the users’ motivation for joining a dating app, for seeking intimacy as well as for self-presentation on the app. Portolan examines the underlying politics and role of infrastructure of dating apps and describes how gender, power, and intimacy intersect to create new intimacy phenomena. She also utilises her research to put forth the key concept of "Jagged Love", which describes a user’s cyclical relationship with dating apps during the pandemic, and the gap between a user’s act to seek familiar romantic narratives and the app’s inability to deliver against these ideas. The chapters further explore the differences between virtual and In Real Life (IRL) intimacy, the generation of gender and the emanation of stereotypical cultural ideals that the users sought through the apps. The book serves as an invaluable discussion on the pandemic’s impact on modifying the definitions of romance and intimacy. This book will be useful for highlighting the impact social factors can have on familiar concepts and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the definition of love and intimacy, making it fascinating for students, academics and professionals interested in relationships, digital media and gender. It will also be useful in enhancing the comprehension of love and romance in the fields of social science.

Organised around a single question: is love possible?, Brown's book provides conceptualisations of love and its possibility from sociological, philosophical and psychoanalytic viewpoints. She argues for the importance of a psychosocial understanding of love and provides a critical discussion of the philosophy and methods of Psychosocial Studies.

Love, Intimacy, and the African American Couple lays out specific strategies that clinicians can use in their work with black couples, regardless of the clinician's own race or level of experience.

The loss of intimacy is one of the most difficult—but also one of the most common—factors in the destruction of any relationship. Recovering Intimacy in Love Relationships lays out practical, evidence-based guidelines on which clinicians can depend as they wade through the intense emotions and fragile bonds of couples in crisis. With care and sensitivity, the book's authors analyze the increasingly complex context in which the cycle of intimacy develops, wanes, and recovers. The chapters delve into diverse populations' attitudes toward intimacy and provide an entire section on cultural, gender and religious issues. Clinicians looking for a research-based, practical take on the many facets of intimacy in the twenty-first century need look no further than this book.

This book addresses the nature of intimacy and relationships in a time of what Eva Illouz characterizes as ‘cold intimacies’. The contributors to this collection highlight the ambivalence and tensions contained in ‘intimacy’ by uncovering a nuanced and complex dynamic, in which interpersonal relations and the public sphere are mutually constituted. A range of topics areexplored, including the new conditions of ‘choice’, the abundance of partners, class and emotional competence, rational decision-making and the specific forms of ‘love pain’ which can emerge from cooled intimacy. The chapters also shed light on the limits of this theoretical contribution, highlighting the importance of parenting, violence, poverty, and other material constraints that continue to limit and frame individuals’ romantic choices. Overall this volume presents an interpretation of intimacy that is not just ‘cold’ but includes practices, desires and feelings that are safe and dangerous, that bring solace or erupt in violence, that lead to salvation or condemnation, and where virtual encounters and increased internal and crossborder mobility have altered the relationship between intimacy and (physical/emotional) distance. Romantic Relationships in a Time of ‘Cold Intimacies’ will be of interest to scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, social work, social policy and demography, as well as practitioners and policy-makers with an interest in couple relationships.