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A sociologist looks at love and asks: What’s culture got to do with it? By Russell Schoch Everybody knows about love. It can, despite Shakespeare, alter when it alteration finds. It certainly means more than never having to say you’re sorry. It’s addictive, it’s transcendent, it’s overrated. It is, in short, as confusing as it is compelling. Berkeley sociology professor Ann Swidler, a co-author of two influential books in her field (Habits of the Heart and The Good Society), has examined America’s obsession with love, and she reports her findings in a new book, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. In it, she asks Tina Turner’s question about love, with a sociological twist: What’s culture got to do with it? “Love seemed a perfect thing to study,” Swidler says, “because love is incredibly important to people. It’s one of those magical words that has enormous power. People ask themselves: Do I love this person? Is this real love? Does my spouse still love me? These questions come up in people’s daily lives, and they’re important. And love struck me as an ideal way to study cultural meanings, because many of our ideas about love come from the culture: from movies, novels, advice books, therapists, songs, gossip, and so on. There’ s a lot of cultural stuff out there about love.” What most surprised Swidler, as she interviewed 88 middle-class men and women from suburban areas of San Jose, was how inconsistent their views of love were. On the one hand, they believed in romantic love (there’s one right person for me); on the other, they scoffed at this “Hollywood” notion, insisting that love is a much more mundane business of getting along with a person whose everyday habits may at times make them cringe. One of Swidler’s key findings is that the modern institution of marriage heavily influences both these understandings of love. Ann Swidler was born in Washington, D.C., but spent her entire childhood in Tennessee, where her father served as general counsel of the Tennessee Valley Authority. She took an enormous cultural leap when she enrolled at Radcliffe College, which she recalls as “just this big world opening up, an incredibly thrilling experience.” During her sophomore year, she fell in love with sociology, and was excited by the notion that “people’s lives are structured by larger conditions that are, in a way, invisible to them.” Swidler finished her B.A. in 1966, spent a year writing a sociology textbook for high schools with Seymour Martin Lipset, and then headed to Berkeley for graduate school. She arrived in the midst of political turmoil. “I wanted to be a sociologist, an academic, at a time when wanting to be such a thing was considered bad,” she says, adding that this cultural clash probably slowed down her progress to the Ph.D., which was granted in 1975. Her first teaching position was at Harvard, where she stayed until her marriage to Berkeley sociologist Claude Fisher brought her back west. She taught at Stanford from 1979 until 1987, then returned to Berkeley. She traces her interest in love to a course she taught as a graduate student here in the early 1970s, when she was a T.A. for eminent sociologist of religion Robert Bellah. “I used love as an example of how to understand the sacred,” she remembers. “I argued that, for modern people, one of the only points at which they actually experience transcendence and awe is in their relationship to the mystery of another human being.” She returned to love in Habits of the Heart, published in 1985, and has now devoted an entire book to the subject. Sitting in the living room of her home in the Elmwood district of Berkeley, she talked, with her characteristic animation, about love.  Tell me, who wrote the book of love? There are so many pages in that book, so many authors! There is no one story, no one source. People draw on all kinds of things in culture when they think about love. For example, some of the people I interviewed quoted from The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran; some were deeply religious and had been influenced by inspirational religious books; others had very rigid upbringings by fundamentalist parents; others had alcoholic parents who had made them disillusioned with life; some looked back on their own parents’ divorce as a very disillusioning experience; others had parents whose marriage they thought of as the ideal of that unquestioned, enduring relationship that could be the touchstone for a whole life. Did this variety surprise you? I found that people don’t have a coherent, consistent feeling about their own love relationships. They seem to have really contradictory understandings of love. But what I saw as inconsistency didn’t bother people. That’s what surprised me. They could have all sorts of different, mutually contradictory ideas, without it being a problem. For example? I have interviews where I asked, “Why do you stay married to the person you’re married to?” And the first answer would be, “Oh, well, because she’s the perfect person.” And I would say, “What if you met somebody more perfect?” And they’d say, “Oh, well, no, it’s not that she’s perfect, it’s just that if you live with someone a long time….” And I’d say, “Does living with someone a long time guarantee happiness?” “Oh, no, it’s not really that,” and they would just change from one reason to another. I’m interested in why these things that seem incompatible to me aren’t incompatible for them. I’m not arguing that people just use any old idea that comes along; it’s more like they’re having a conversation, and are adapting their ideas to the flow of the conversation. And that’s a perfectly sensible thing to do. I came to see that culture serves people better when they use it in a flexible way, and when it contains a lot of alternative ways of understanding the world. And this is true when people are thinking of love? I found out that there are fundamentally two different ways of understanding love, and they came up at different points in people’s conversations. The first is the standard image of the romantic love ideal—one true love; love at first sight; you meet the one right person, and you know it, and you have to be with that person. That’s the love of the classical novel and of the Hollywood movie. All my interviewees know about that kind of love. They know this story very, very well. But they all claimed that they didn’t believe in it. That’s what I mean about culture being inconsistent. You asked: Who wrote the book of love? Well, they would say: “Hollywood wrote the book of love, but I don’t believe in that book.” What, then, do they believe? At one level, they believe in what I came to see as a second understanding of love, what I came to call the “prosaic-realistic” understanding of love. You might call it “mature love.” They would say: “Real love has to develop gradually; you can’t even know what real love is until you’ve been together, lived together, struggled together, had fights and understood each other’s strengths and weaknesses—otherwise, it’s just infatuation. Infatuation might feel nice, it’s fun, we’ve all been there. But that’s not love.” They’d say: “Real love is compromise and understanding that you won’t always get what you want, but you’re there for the other person, or you’re willing to talk things out, to struggle to make things work. And you have to work at it.” So I began to get this picture of real love as a more humdrum thing. Even when people recounted their personal histories in response to the question, “How did you know this was the right person for you?,” I got these mostly, in a sense, boring stories. No lightning strikes? Very rarely. Mostly the stories were humdrum. And then I started to see that the stories were actively being made humdrum, in service of this ideal of the mature, or prosaic-realistic, love. If real love were this thing that grew gradually, needed understanding and compromise, then people were retrospectively emphasizing the kind of predictable, mundane parts. Why would this be? I think it’s because contemporary couples who are in committed relationships—both marriages and marriage-like relationships—think of breakup as an ever-present danger. It’s like what sometimes happens in college: When you get there, you’re told to look to your left and to your right—one of you won’t be here at the end of the year. Well, couples feel that. Knowing that almost 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, they don’t want theirs to be one of those. They all want to be the ones who are going to stay happily married. Is the notion of “prosaic-realistic” love a lowering of expectations? It’s more that people want any theory that will help them not be one of the couples that gets divorced. And that’s part of why their use of culture is so promiscuous, so to speak. They’ll use any cultural element that promises to help them navigate the real problem of divorce. How do I keep my relationship from being one of the ones that breaks up? One way to do it is to say: “Oh, that intense sexual attraction and all that—it’s nice, we had that, it was good. But I’m not expecting bells to ring every time we kiss, or to feel butterflies in my stomach when I see my spouse across the room. Because that’s not real love, and that won’t last.” And so, if you’re not expecting such things, there’s a greater chance that your marriage will last. The inconsistency of cultures is vital here. You can read in a woman’s magazine that if couples fight, that will strengthen their marriage. The next week, a man reads something that says, if you tell your wife every day that you love her, that will strengthen your marriage. And then you go to a Marriage Encounter group which tells you that if you don’t have expectations that are too high you’ll be better off; or that if you stop trying to put yourself down all the time, that will make things better. You might read your horoscope to find out how to make your marriage succeed. You might consult your mother or your girlfriend. People consume vast amounts of such advice, which they pick and choose from, try out for a while or don’t, and then switch to something else. All of this advice is inconsistent. But all of it has the goal of bringing culture to bear on a problem to solve: how to sustain an enduring relationship in a world that makes them fragile and problematic. Are we really that inconsistent? Yes. People shift their positions all the time. I find no evidence for the idea that there is a consistent worldview that you carry around inside you, which guides all your actions. People use their ideas to navigate situations and relationships. But they don’t build their lives on ideas. Ideas can be discarded? Not discarded. Just juggled and ignored. That’s how we get through life—by juggling and ignoring our ideas? Exactly. It’s not that people have no core. It’s that in defending the core, they’re willing to move around a lot in terms of their ideas. Renata Rosaldo has a wonderful essay, “While making other plans,” about the way in which models of culture that assume some sort of consistent rule or plan just can’t be right. Because you really draw on culture when something unexpected happens. This sounds like a theory of human nature. I think it’s more a theory of cultural nature. It’s a question of how culture actually works, of how people use cultural ideas. What I want to say about love is that people do manage quite effectively to juggle what can be thought of as inconsistent ideas.
No! It turned out that these same people who were telling me about how love grows gradually and there’s no such thing as true love would suddenly switch discourses. One staid engineer, whom I had been trying to get to say what love was, would never use the word. Why did he marry her? “Well, she was nice. We got along.” And I’d ask: Did you love her? He’d say: “She’s all right. We got along.” He was going on like this. Late in the interview, I asked: “What if something happened to her, and you had to take care of her? And he said: “If you love her, you’ll stay with her. She is my life! I love her!” There it was: “I love her.” One woman said: “Love? I don’t know. Sometimes I wake up in the morning, I look at him across the pillow, and I hate him! But that doesn’t mean I don’t love him.” I found this again and again, that people actually talk both languages. The prosaic, which in itself draws on all these contradictory discourses: fight fairly, don’t fight; suppress your feelings, express your feelings; get your anger out, hold your anger in. But, in addition to that, there is the other, pure, one-true-love, romantic mode. I began to realize that this came up in the same place in the interviews: When it was a question about the choice of whether to stay in the marriage or go—that was when they needed the romantic-love way of thinking. So, if what you’re doing is sustaining a relationship day in, day out, you bracket off those questions about romantic love. But if someone asks—in an interview or in real life—“Is this relationship it?” when you’re trying to make an all-or-nothing decision, whether it’s during courtship or deep into the marriage, then that’s when people call on romantic love. Why? Precisely because marriage provides the model for what a committed or enduring relationship is. And marriages are exclusive, all-or-nothing, life-transforming commitments. So when you’re asking, “Should I marry this person?” or, “Am I going to stay in this relationship?”—that’s when you ask, “Do I truly love him?” My support for this is a thought experiment. If you think about your friends, you might well say that you love your friends. I think many of us do—in fact, many women might say, “I love my friends as much as I love my husband.” If love means intimacy and sharing thoughts and feelings, you certainly can love your friends. But no matter how much you love them, you’re not going to say, “Is this it?” or “Is this real love?” Now, it’s not a matter of not loving friends. You may even experience delight every time you see your best friend or hear their voice. If it’s someone you don’t see very often, you may experience that same kind of thrilled anticipation waiting for the person to get off a plane, and so on. But the way in which you ask of a romantic relationship—Is this real love? Is this really it? Is she or he the one?—you would never do that with friendship. What does this tell us about how people use the idea of love? I think that people use the term love and the idea of love in two different ways, because they have two different problems to solve. The romantic version, felt as an emotion, tells us whether a relationship is the kind that can form a marriage or a marriage-like commitment. The romantic understanding of love is about that problem. And that is increasingly a problem people feel they have to solve again and again. They don’t have to solve it every day; but they have to solve it more than once in the course of their marriages precisely because of the danger of a breakup. Another life problem is how to sustain ongoing relationships, and here people have a huge surplus of cultural resources with which to approach that process. This is the prosaic version you mentioned earlier? Yes. But when they are making the all-or-nothing decision—during courtship and during problem times in a marriage—they use the romantic version. If you think about it, that is really an extraordinary decision: to be able, at one moment, to pull together all the threads of who you are, and how you imagine your life and the other person’s life in the years ahead….That’s when you put the question in this way: Do I love him? Is this it? Is she the one? Is this the right choice? That’s an extraordinary decision! And I think one needs, in a way, an ideology as rich and as powerful as the idea of love to make that decision. Otherwise people would have to just force you into marriage, to arrange it for you. Of course, that’s what happened in a lot of societies, where pragmatic motives were enough to get people married. But when you have as many choices as we do, you need something that will launch you over the barrier between “Oh, I don’t know, I’m confused about this” and “I’m sure enough that I can make this commitment; this is the one.” You need to be able to feel that way in order to make a commitment of the sort that the institution of marriage demands. It happens that in some cultures people can go into mystical trances in which they commune with spirits or walk on fire. One of the miracles of our culture, the romantic ideal of love, is that we configure ourselves as people who are able to make an all-or-nothing life choice in an emotionally convincing way that we internally know and act upon as if we know it is right. And it takes a lot of culture to do that. So we are configured to feel this certainty? I think that there’s something psychologically natural about love. But the way you develop motivations, the way you develop interpretations of your own feelings—even the way you develop the kind of elaborate emotions that we call love, shame, resentment, or honor—are specific to the culture in which you are raised. Take the concept of honor, for example. It is something we don’t cultivate very strongly in our culture, but it is a central feature in many cultures, and if you ask people who grew up with this as a central feature why they do what they do, they would say: “Anyone would do this—commit a murder, sacrifice his property, spend her entire life sewing a bridal trousseau for her daughter—for honor and the family’s honor.” Well, that would be a strange thing for us to do, in our culture, and we would think of that as a motivation we do not have. So, yes, I think we really are constrained by the way the fundamental institutions we live with organize our experience. And, in the case of love, our fundamental institution is marriage? Yes. We’re always either searching for, or in, or deciding whether to stay in or get out of a long-term, committed relationship that is by definition exclusive and all-or-nothing; and this provides the template for the construction of an inner state that would have that same property, that same feeling about it: exclusive, all-or-nothing, absolute, yes-or-no, and so on. We don’t have any reason to think that the human psyche has to work that way. The human psyche by nature may be much more labile, much more uncertain, much more diffuse. But the institutional structure of marriage means that we need the capacity to generate in ourselves the psychic equipment that can get us into and help us decide when to stay in or get out of enduring relationships. And how does culture do its work here? The cultural equipment we need to make these distinctions is very elaborate. It means knowing the myth of true love. It means knowing when not to be misled by what people learn to call “infatuation.” The people I interviewed had very elaborate stories and language for differentiating what they had come to call puppy love or infatuation or intense sexual attraction from real love—real love being the kind that lasts, that can make a marriage. And then learning how to read your own psyche, to take your own emotional pulse in such a way that you can ask yourself: Can I imagine being with this person a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, forever? Can I really imagine not wanting something else? And it takes a huge amount of cultural stuff—poems, novels, conversations with your friends, watching soap operas, watching true love triumph in one movie after another—for people to learn to differentiate the sort of “bad love” that won’t get you there from the real love that’s the one you really want. That story is told over and over again, and it’s endlessly fascinating and fun to watch. Why? Because at some level we really are all forced to look for the one right person, not by some sort of cultural programming—actually, our culture is also willing to imagine running off with the wrong person and following your infatuation wherever it leads. But we’re coerced by the need to produce the psychic equipment that allows us to cope with the institutional order in which we live. And this has changed. Yes. The institution of marriage is still exclusive, still all-or-nothing, still intense and life-changing. But it isn’t permanent anymore, the threat of divorce and dissolution is all around us. And therefore we have an enormous amount of new culture that elaborates not the romantic story of how to get into and out of love, but the prosaic story of how to keep a relationship going. So now people are absorbing and inventing from wherever they can—the cover story in Redbook, the sermon their minister gave last week, the communication skills they learn in therapy, the interpretation of the crisis in their own relationship they had last year, last month, or a decade ago—anything that gives them ways of understanding the problem they face. Which is that this terribly important relationship of marriage is fragile, and they need to work on it in order to support it and sustain it. If we ask why cultural things we don’t believe in—like the Hollywood version of love—keep reproducing themselves in us, even when we regard them as violations of good common sense, I think we must look to the demands that institutions make and to the cultural stuff that people invent in order to cope with these demands: romantic love to get people into or out of a marriage, prosaic love to keep the relationship going. Did you think this before you wrote your book? No. This emerged out of many, many, many readings of my interviews and a great deal of thinking. People need and use culture—the culture of love, in this case—in different ways at different times. They’re not as consistent as I thought they might be. They don’t have a coherent worldview that guides them every step of the way, at all times. Instead, people tack back and forth to get where they want to be. Because that’s how real life is lived.  Return to Top |
 Ann Swidler Photo by Robert Holmgren
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