Introduction

Chapter 7 reviews the relationship of emotion, love and intimacy and looks at some of the key contributors to this growing field, which includes theoretical perspectives on traditional and contemporary models of love and intimacy. The chapter draws on perspectives from feminist, sociological and cultural theorists who have offered a wide range of theoretical and conceptual frameworks in understanding the relationship between love, intimacy and emotions. The chapter adopts a socio-historical perspective in analyzing the work of writers and theorists in the field, including Giddens (1991, 1992); Beck and Beck-Gernsheim ([1995] 2002); Illouz (1997a, 1998, 2010, 2012); Shumway (2003); Gross (2005) and O’Neill (2015a, 2015b), as well as the author's earlier work in the field (Brooks, 2017, 2019a). The chapter is divided into three sections as follows: Part I. Romantic love and the emergence of intimacy; Part II. Romance as a postmodern condition: Illouz, love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism; Part III. ‘Mediated intimacy’ in heterosexual men.

Part I. Romantic love and the emergence of intimacy

Shumway offers an important socio-historical contextualization of the field of romantic love and the growth of intimacy. Love and marriage is of course at its heart an economic and class-based enterprise. As Shumway (2003: 7) shows: ‘The aristocrats needed marriages of alliance to preserve their power and wealth, and the working class typically married for the economic advantages that extra hands brought to the household.’

Gross (2005) makes the important point that narratives of romantic love have their origins in the West. Gross argues that the origins of romantic love are very clearly Western, and not, as is sometimes thought, universal. Their origins are in narratives of courtly love which first emerged in verse in the 11th and 12th centuries in Aquitaine and Provence (see Bloch, 1992; Duby, 1994).

Gross notes that the term ‘courtly love’ was first used in 1883, when Gaston Paris, the French medievalist, used it to describe the passionate love which characterized the love between Lancelot and Guinevere in Chrétien de Troyes's 12th-century romantic verse in Old French entitled Lancelot ou le chevalier de la charette. The basis of these romantic narratives were romantic liaisons in which knights in the royal courts proclaimed their love for and fell in love with married noblewomen.