Abstract
With a focus on established heterosexual romantic relationships, this chapter engages with Illouz’s claim that the predominance of the therapeutic ethos has caused a convergence in the capacity for intimacy between middle-class men and women and a divergence between working- and middle-class men. We present original research where class differences in positive orientations to communication in romantic relationships were not found, while gender differences in the capacity for emotional openness persisted. We argue that Illouz’s adaptations of a Bourdieusian framework, reversing the direction of socialisation and theorising emotional competence as of actual rather than arbitrary value, lead her to overstate gender convergence and exclude alternative forms of intimacy. We question the homogenising and pessimistic portrayal of working-class men’s relationships thus produced by Illouz’s analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Illouz subsequently addressed issues of emotional inequality between men and women in Why Love Hurts (2017). The book extends her work on the implications of changes in romantic and sexual partner selection. As such, her focus there is not on the established couple relationships which are the subject of McQueen’s research and of Illouz’s exposition of the concepts of gender convergence and androgyny in middle-class couples. Illouz does not engage with those concepts in Why Love Hurts. However, her attention to gender asymmetries around choice and desire which inhibit communication, in respect of both long-term commitment and having children, suggests that the differently constructed relations of men and women to ‘the reproductive arena’ (Connell 2002), for example, pose unrecognised problems for the concepts of gender convergence and androgynisation in her earlier work.
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McQueen, F., Osborn, S. (2020). ‘I Would Like to Be Better at It’: A Critical Engagement with Illouz’s Account of Men and Intimacy in Romantic Relationships. In: Carter, J., Arocha, L. (eds) Romantic Relationships in a Time of ‘Cold Intimacies’. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29256-0_5
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