Weakened marriage security made romantic love both more sought and more distrusted

Evidence

Writing in the early internet era, Zygmunt Bauman (2003) argued that the previously reassuring fantasy of a happy marriage was being replaced by an imaginary limitless expansion of sexual possibilities through online dating. Bauman saw nascent digital intimacies as another realm of sociality where the corrosive effect of late-­modern consumption was becoming prevalent: (pre-­smartphone) online dating was a perfect place where one could shop around mindlessly, without responsibilities or risks and with minimal emotional pain. But with the security of the marriage contract progressively weakened over the course of the twentieth century, the pursuit of love in capitalist society became both more urgent and more uncertain. This, then, was the paradox of modern intimacy, which continued to persist even when an individual pursuit paused and a new relationship began; as Arlie Hochschild (2003) put it, while “culture now invites a couple to aspire to a richly communicative, intimate, playful, sexually fulfilling love,” the rising tide of uncertainties in contemporary society conditions people “against trusting such a love too much” (123). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 350

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to Bauman’s liquid modernity thesis and Hochschild’s commercialization of intimate life; connects to the reader’s finance-imagination theme via how market-style shopping mentality colonizes intimacy. — connects to: Love commonly produces trust rather than presupposing it; Romantic love’s redemptive promise now conflicts with our embrace of uncertainty — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 232; Modern culture simultaneously demands intimate love and makes trusting it irrational — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 350 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Love commonly produces trust rather than presupposing it #expands (0.85)
• Modern culture simultaneously demands intimate love and makes trusting it irrational #corroborates (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 350
• Romantic love’s redemptive promise now conflicts with our embrace of uncertainty #expands (0.82) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 232
• Love does not obviously involve trust and usually precedes rather than follows it. #contradicts (0.70) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 655