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I do not agree with the way Illouz talks of the 'seduction' love exercizes on women in the last excerpt hereunder. I think it is the legacy of most of pre-modern history, through which Western women were not left much choice as to the sphere of life they wanted to express themselves in. It is not that they were particularly 'seduced' by love, it is just that they were relegated to it. Love was socially constructed as a 'female' domain, in which they had to thrive and to invest, lest they be branded ugly, masculine or spinsters (the hidden and common theme of these three patriarchal scarecrows being of course heternormativity, with its correlates of lesbo- and transphobia). And the same goes for the domestic sphere and care. Although it seems that Illouz falls here into what she denounces throughout the book (the making of social phenomena into individual struggles and responsibilities), I still find her observations enlightening.  "Precisely because we...

"A contemporary Catherine [the heroine of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights ] or Emma [the heroine of Flaubert's Madame Bovary ] would have spent a great deal of time reflecting and talking about their pain and likely found its causes in their own (or their lovers') deficient childhood. They would have derived a sense of glory not from the experience of grief, but precisely from having overcome it, through an arsenal of self-help therapeutic techniques. [T]he search for love [in high modern times] is an agonizingly difficult experience from which few modern men and women have been spared. [...] Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. [...] The Freudian culture in which we are steeped has made the forceful claim that sexual attraction is best explained by our past experiences, and that the love preference is formed in early life in the relationship be...