16 The New York Reviewtrans people, no happy relationships,
and—with the exception of a 1,700-
word Quora post, quoted in full, detail-
ing a drug- fueled threesome—no good
sex. If anything, the book is openly
hostile toward pleasure, which, when
enjoyed “for its own sake,” turns out to
be complicit with capitalist enterprise.
“Jouissance,” Illouz concludes, using
the French word for enjoyment or or-
gasm, “cannot properly find or consti-
tute objects of interactions, love, and
solidarity.” Well, you might ask: Since
when?The End of Love is not a book about
literature, but it’s still compulsively
literary. Illouz gets her sense of the
present from rummaging through the
dustbin of digital culture, but when
it comes to thinking about the past,
great books—by Plato, Dante, Aus-
ten, Trollope, Tolstoy, Flaubert—are
her primary sources. A historian might
complain that fictional texts don’t have
the same evidentiary heft as court or
household records, census data, and
the like, but let’s leave such grumbling
aside. Stranger by far is that Illouz
presents a view of both sex and litera-
ture so joyless and antiseptic it makes
you wonder why anyone would be in-
terested in them at all.
Not coincidentally, her ideas about
who does what to whom are derived
entirely from representations of high-
status people, among them Athenian
citizens, English aristocrats, and the
French bourgeoisie. Ancient Athens
was a patriarchal slave state, no doubt,
but its material culture—religious ar-
tifacts, paintings on urns, friezes, and
so on—depicts a world of multifarious
identities and acts that don’t make it
into Plato’s Symposium. Literary texts,
too, survive that add much to Illouz’s
crude picture of premodern sexuality,
from the songs of Sappho to some-
times rueful, often raunchy epigrams
by poets like Philodemus—“I’ve been
in love. Who hasn’t? I’ve processed /
Drunkenly after dinner to her door”—
and Dioscorides:Doris, the rosy- buttocked: on her
bed
I stretched her out, and at her
tender touch
Became immortal. For she
straddled me,
And rode me, dominant,
unswervingly,
Till Aphrodite’s marathon was
run,
Looking me in the eye all sleepily;
And like the leaves that flutter in
the wind
She shook that scarlet bottom till
we came,
And the white seed had made us
both a mess,
And she was spread there twitch-
ing, all undone.
(translated by Gideon Nisbet)Or take these lines from Theocritus’s
Idyll 12, in which a man welcomes his
lover’s return after an agonizing ab-
sence (of two days) with a fantasy of
reciprocal affection and future renown:How I wish the Loves might
breathe an equal passion
Into us both, so that future men
might sing of us:
“These were two famous men in
former times—One the ‘Inspirer’ (as the speech
of Amyclae has it)
And one the ‘Listener’ (as they
say in Thessaly).
They were yoked in mutual love.”
(translated by Anthony Verity)While it would be absurd to deny
that sex is and has always been indivis-
ible from questions of power, it would
be equally absurd to suggest that no
one in the ancient world ever had a
good time or treated a lover kindly
while getting them off. Enlightenment
philosophers may have invented the
sexual contract, but they did not invent
consensual sex.
Why does this matter? For one thing,
it points out some difficulties in the
study of sexuality. People are different,
but difference tends to vanish from the
historical record. As Saidiya Hartman
puts it in her exquisite Wayward Lives,
Beautiful Experiments: Intimate His-
tories of Riotous Black Girls, Trouble-
some Women, and Queer Radicals:Every historian of the multitude,
the dispossessed, the subaltern,
and the enslaved is forced to grap-
ple with the power and author-
ity of the archive and the limits it
sets on what can be known, whose
perspective matters, and who is
endowed with the gravity and au-
thority of historical actor.In other words, communities, identi-
ties, desires, habits, and acts that don’t
conform to the sensibilities of elites are
often silenced or lost.The End of Love is about relatively
wealthy, mostly straight, and mostly
white people, so it’s not surprising that
its history of hitherto existing society
focuses on that same demographic.
And yet Illouz’s conviction that the
literary past bears out her view of the
libidinal present is so tendentious one
has to ask what ends it serves. Who
benefits from denying that sex, however
complicit with social control and dom-
ination, has sometimes made human
beings feel good and happy, has been a
form of care, an occasion for solidarity,
and a nice thing in a hard world? Who
wants to forget that for every Dante
connecting amorous desire to “a quasi-
religious prayer- like emotion” there
are the refugees of The Decameron,
swapping dirty stories while they wait
out the plague?
The best way to understand this book
is as a symptom of heterosexuality’s
hard- earned contempt for itself. The
End of Love is populated by women
who see sex “as undermining the possi-
bility of being recognized as a person,”
who long for relationships anchored by
certainty only to find out that marriage
and monogamy can be terrible, too. As
“Julia,” a sixty- seven- year- old Austrian
woman, says of her husband, “He crit-
icizes me for not being careful enough
with my weight. We often have fights
about it but the bottom line is that I
have been dieting all my life.” This is
awful, but so is Illouz’s determination
to make a spectacle of her subjects and
to insist—against all evidence to the
contrary—that the problem with rela-
tionships these days is how easily they
end. Run, Julia, run!
All of Illouz’s anecdotes unfold
along these lines. There are no domi-
nant Dorises shivering with orgasmicsatisfaction, no poets dreaming of
equal passion and mutual love. Rather,
the shabby lives of her informants are
measured against the marriage plots of
nineteenth- century novels. In such un-
sexy fiction as Trollope’s Can You For-
give Her? love is “the starting rather
than end point of” courtship, which
follows “a narrative and sequentialized
structure”: men declare themselves
right off the bat and propose soon after.
This is all to the good, for it neutralizes
“emotional uncertainty” and thus saves
the female ego from fracturing with
self- doubt. In the words of Alice Vava-
sor, who in Trollope’s Palliser series
surrenders to a marriage she doesn’t
quite want, there is just “no alternative
but to be happy.”
Is this state of affairs truly prefera-
ble to our current regime of “it’s com-
plicated”? Illouz seems to think so.
For her, the marriage plot is not just
the basis for a certain kind of fiction,
it’s the blueprint for a certain kind of
life: a good one. When women (always
women) lose its shape, they exchange
Mr. Rochester for piddling jackasses
like the hero of Adelle Waldman’s The
Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Curiously,
Illouz treats the titular Nate Piven like
one of her real- world informants, his
odious appraisals of a potential girl-
friend—“If Hannah had been more
obviously hot, he was pretty sure that
he would have given her more thought”
(Illouz’s emphasis)—presented as a
window into the modern male psyche.
Now, this isn’t to suggest that Illouz
is misreading Waldman’s novel, whose
success depends—at least partly—on
how true it rings to an audience of
hyper- educated, semi- single thirty-
somethings and especially to women
like Hannah. By a similar token, the
romances of Sally Rooney seem aimed
at readers who, like her characters,
have sex with the austere diligence of
a high school valedictorian. What sets
Rooney apart is that she makes what
ought to be the most ordinary aspects
of intimacy seem aspirational, as if con-
sent and mutual gratification—how-
ever defined—were the summit and not
the ground of erotic possibility.
The End of Love is the perfect com-
plement to novels like these. It takes
great pleasure in describing a world
that offers close to none. It is also the
perfect complement to varieties of
contemporary feminist critique that
refuse to imagine what a sexually free
future might look like, instead confin-
ing themselves to the sort of fashion-
able misandry and censorious elitism
Illouz indulges here. What to make of
the claim that (according to a single,
nearly twenty- year- old study) virgins
who “transition” to casual rather than
“romantic sex... [are] far more likely
to suffer symptoms of depression, to
be the object of violence, or to commit
crime themselves”? With nary a word
about how poverty or racial oppression
might twist the arc of a person’s sexual
career, Illouz asks us simply to accept
that sex without love is a one- way ticket
to social death.If The End of Love has a literary hero,
it’s the French novelist Michel Houelle-
becq. “In the same way that Henry
James, Balzac, or Zola examined in
their novels the massive shift from a
pre- modern hierarchy and cosmos to
a society governed by exchange and
money,” Houellebecq examines “a so-ciety governed by sexual freedom”—
that is, by a joyless permissiveness
that trivializes human attachments to
the point of destroying them entirely,
with terrible consequences. In Houel-
lebecq’s “fictional universe,” Illouz
observes, “the very future (and de-
mise) of Western civilization lies in its
(de)regulation of sexuality.” When
we talk about the end of love, we’re
talking about nothing less than the end
of the world.
Now, one would think, reading The
End of Love or, say, Houellebecq’s The
Elementary Particles—which alter-
nates between dismal scenes of group
sex and eulogies for an old regime
of “unwavering connection between
marriage, sex and love”—that sexual
freedom is precisely what we do not
have and desperately need. The trou-
ble is not that we are sluts or seducers,
that we’re too gullible or lecherous or
watching too much porn. The trouble is
that we live at a moment when our basic
needs aren’t being met by institutions,
and so we are forced to rely on personal
relationships to provide us not just with
pleasure, excitement, and spiritual
growth but with health care and a place
to sleep. That’s a lot of pressure to put
on a marriage or a throuple or a situ-
ationship and, with so much at stake,
it’s no wonder that even the most seem-
ingly adventurous propositions often
default to a depressing conventionality.
Sex, you might say, does not yet know
how to be free. It hasn’t been given the
chance.
Illouz, it seems, is one of those peo-
ple who hates capitalism without much
liking anything else. She never asks
herself if casual sex would be okay (or
even awesome) if it happened in an-
other kind of society organized around
a different set of values, one in which
people truly were free to eat when they
needed to eat, rest when they wanted
to rest, get medical treatment when
they were sick, or fuck when they felt
like it. Are dating apps bad in them-
selves? Or are they bad because the
tech companies that profit from them
also drive the gentrification that makes
Grindr necessary, the bathhouses
having long since vanished? To ask
a grander question: What would our
lives, and not just our sex lives, be
like if we thought of pleasure as a so-
cial good, to which everyone ought to
have access?
And what would modern literature
be like if it wasn’t obliged to yoke sex
to either marriage or misery? Maybe it
would be like the dream Audre Lorde
recounts in the first essay of Sister Out-
sider, in which she’s having sex with
an anonymous sick woman—not, she
notes, her longtime companion Fran-
ces Clayton—in a department store
and realizes to her delight that health
care is free and her lover is covered.
Or perhaps, like the novels of Barbara
Browning, it would follow an oblique
arc toward no particular conclusion,
leaving the marriage plot behind to
explore the narrative potential of
polyamory. Unloving, for Illouz, is a
social catastrophe with a sodden aes-
thetic footprint. It has left its mark on
a whole host of adulterous, libertine,
or otherwise incontinent fictions from
Madame Bovary to Pornhub’s most
viewed videos of the week. But un-
loving has another history: less tragic,
more ordinary, a little hard to find but
by no means invisible. It too is worth
a read. QNersessian 15 16 .indd 16 12 / 16 / 21 4 : 51 PM