Why Love Hurts is a modern answer to a timeless question. This new book by Eva Illouz, Professor of Sociology at Hebrew University, sets out to do for emotional suffering and romantic love what Marx did for commodities, exposing the socio-economic underbelly of what we once took to be the natural features of a happy and fulfilling life. For those in her target audience, namely heterosexual Western women, Illouz hopes to offer a compelling account of how suffering in love has come to be internalized as personal failure. The successes and failures of Why Love Hurts aside, her efforts should be commended for giving a full academic treatment to amorous relationships in neo-liberal times, heeding Frederic Jameson’s call to “always historicize.”
