TALK

LOVE
How CULTURE MATTERS
Ann Swidler
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
helped me work out the
D:OOlpatral,lygerLenlUs Paul DiMaggio, a spe-
the entire manuscript and an extraordi-
JfSiligg.:osti<JllS (only some of which I was able to fully ex-
ro my hilarious, brilliant friend, Ron Jepperson, who,
21S sa)" is very good to think with. And for continuing
_IiiSnp][){)]"t, and shared engagement in thinking about how cul-
like to thank Wendy Griswold, Yasemin Soysal, Peter
Sromberg, Steve Hart, and Jorge Arditi. Dick Scott, Buzz Zelditch, John
Meyer, Vicki Bonnell, Lynn Hunt, and William Sewell Jr. offered valuable
advice on early versions of all or part of the manuscript.
Doug Mitchell, my editor, deserves a paragraph of his own (a whole
book, in fact, but he probably wouldn't want to wait). Paeans of praise to
editors often seem excessive, but those who have had the good fortune to
work with Doug-and it isn't work, but inspired intellectual play-know
what an extraordinary person he is. His passion for ideas warms the soul.
Lesley Jenkins, Mary Garrett, and especially Rita Jalali conducted
many of the interviews for this project. Orie Braun, Amy Schalet, and Eliz-
abeth Armstrong provided valuable research assistance. Sue Thur and
Judy Haier were willing, as always, to do far more than dut)' required. And
Jennifer Moorhouse was an expert manuscript editor and a pleasure to
work with.
I would also like to thank the institutions whose financial support
made this project possible: the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foun-
dation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford and Rocke-
feller Foundations, the Boy's Town Center of Stanford Universit)', and the
Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley. It is
appropriate that I should have completed final work on this book in
Paris, thanks to the French-American Foundation in New York and the
kindness of my host, Professor Jean Heffer, of the Centre d'Etudes Nord-
Americaines of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
My children, Leah and Avi Fischer, have provided constant, if some-
times distracting, entertainment during the course of work on this book.
Life with them has taught me how the deepest meaning is often found in
what one can least articulate. My beloved parents, Joseph and Gretchen
Swidler, and my family, Cathy Fischer, Ralph and Rosette Fischer, and
Mark and Wendi Swidler, have sustained me with their love.
And finally my husband, Claude Fischer, has been there for me and
with me, really with me, throughout. I could hardly begin to list the thou-
sands of ways, both intellectual and practical, in which he has helped. But
all these laid end to end don't go halfway toward capturing what it has
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INTRODUCTION
Lis is a book about love, about Americans, and about culture. It deals
with each of these in a distinctive way, which requires
some explanation.
This book is about the culture of love. It looks at
middle-class Americans' views of such matters as what
love is, how one knows when love is "real," what is re-
quired for a good relationship, whether love involves ob-
ligation or sacrifice, and where love fits into the larger
scheme oflife's meanings. It is less concerned with social,
psychological, or biological explanations of who loves
whom, why people marry the people they do, why some
marriages last and others end in divorce, or why some
lovers are happy and others miserable. Rather, it uses the
ways one particular group of Americans think and talk
about love to explore larger questions about culture
and meaning-how culture actually works when people
bring it to bear on a central arena of their daily experi-
ence and especially how culture is (or is not) linked to
action. While most of the book rests on interviews about
love, some of its arguments and evidence range much
more widely, examining how culture is used in the polit-
ical arena, in religious life, and in other cultural spheres.
LOVE
When I began this research, many academic colleagues
greeted the topic with embarrassment or
leave love to lovers; you can't study love. Sociologists
2 INTRODUCTION
investigate marriage and family life, but love has seemed too personal, too
mysterious, and, I would argue, too sacred for serious sociological study.
Now work on the psychology and sociology of emotions has made the
study oflove respectable, and we have increasingly rich historical, socio-
logical, and cultural work on love. My own research has been informed by
the important studies of Francesca Cancian (1987), Naomi Quinn (1987,
1996, Strauss and Quinn 1997), and most recendy Eva IlIouz (1997). There
is also a large and growing popular and scholarly literature on the history
of love (Rothman 1987; Sternberg 1998), on contemporary dating and
marriage (Skolnick 1991; Scarf 1987; Lystra 1989; Kern 1992; Lindholm
1998), on passion and intimacy (Luhmann 1986; Giddens 1992), and on
historical transformations of human sexuality (Laqueur 1990; Seidman
1991; Ullman 1997; Bailey 1999). But we still know very little about the
most important aspect of love: what it actually means to people.
Students of culture usually study a society's core symbols-its reli-
gious beliefs and practices; its art, literature, or music; its myths, folklore,
and popular beliefs. Although love is a quintessentially personal, private
experience, love is just as profoundly social and cultural.
Love is a central theme of our popular culture as well as our greatest
art, from soap operas to Shakespeare. It is also one of the richest sources
of the pervasive folk culture of gossip, commiseration, confession, and
advice-giving. Indeed, love recommends itself to students of culture pre-
cisely because, unlike many of the political and social attitudes sociolo-
gists normally study, love really matters to most ordinary Americans. It is
central, not peripheral, to their lives.
Love also provokes moral deliberation. For many Americans, in-
deed, "morality" primarily involves conduct in the personal sphere oflove
and sexual intimacy (see Sabini and Silver 1982 and Taylor 1994 on gos-
sip). People may take it for granted that murder or stealing is wrong, but
they must stop to consider whether and when sleeping with someone is
morally right; the ethics of divorce, fidelity, and adultery; and the obliga-
tions of those who love each other. With the pervasive threat of divorce,
men and women must continually consider and reconsider the ethical
dilemmas oflove and marriage.
Thus, from a sociologist's point of view, love is a perfect place to study
culture in action. Here a rich and diverse cultural tradition permeates or-
dinary lives. Whether people's beliefs about love sustain them or leave
them disillusioned, whether people are confused or certain about love,
whether they enjoy deep philosophizing or simply adopt convenient plat-
itudes, for most people how they think and talk about love matters.
INTRODUCTION I 3
AMERICANS
To explore how people think about love, three research assistants and I
interviewed eighty-eight middle-class men and women from suburban
areas in and around San Jose, California. These were white, middle- and
upper-middle-class representatives of the American mainstream, re-
cruited through churches, neighbors, friends, coworkers, therapists, and
a local community college.! (The methodological appendix provides a de-
tailed description of the sample, the interview, and a copy of the interview
guide.) These comfortable suburbanites were not so much "typical" as
"prototypical" Americans. Their mainstream culture, with all its confu-
sions and contradictions, provides the background against which most
other Americans define their understandings of love. As I point out be-
low, my interviewees had a complex, ambivalent relationship to the domi-
nant culture. Theywere often critical of romance, disillusioned with prom-
ises of happiness ever after, and even uncertain about the concept oflove
itself. But like other Americans, including those from other cultural tra-
ditions or those whose relationships challenge mainstream expectations,
they are continually aware of the discourses about love, commitment, self-
discovery, and happiness the wider society makes available. Thus under-
standing the lineaments of that culture matters far beyond the middle-class
suburban milieu of the far-flung San Jose suburbs.
Because I was interested in when culture doesn't work as well as
when it does, I wanted to talk with people who had had enough life expe-
rience to test and perhaps alter what they once believed about love. I thus
sought to interview adults in midlife (interviewees ranged from twenty to
sixty years of age, with the great majority in their thirties and forties) who
were or had been married. I included a substantial number who had been
divorced, to find out how people reshape their understanding of love
when it seems to fail them.
These interviews were in some ways very different from the standard
social-scientific survey (see the methodological appendix). Lasting from
ninety minutes to more than three hours, the interviews dealt with how
people had grown up, what had led them to become who they were, what
was important to them about work and family life. The interview dealt
most centrally with love as a part of personal biography, asking people
what they had learned about love, how their views had changed, and what
they currendy thought. I tried to explore not only general beliefs about
love, marriage, and personal relationships but also more subde matters,
such as how people recognize signs and symptoms of love, what people
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4
INTRODUCTION
find most confusing about love, and how people think about different
kinds oflove.
What was most distinctive about these interviews, however, was that
they explored confusions and uncertainties as well as thought-out con-
clusions. I pushed at what people told me. If someone said "Communica-
tion is the most important thing in marriage," I tried to find out more
about what she or he meant by that. Were there limits on what spouses
could communicate? Did communication always work? What were con-
crete examples of communication that strengthened marriage? For inter-
viewees who stressed personal growth, I asked whether personal growth
made love precarious. For those who emphasized commitment in rela-
tionships, I asked whether commitment constrained personal growth. I
probed for the ways people thought through issues in their own past or
present relationships, and with some interviewees I also used structured
stories about hypothetical couples to pose dilemmas about love (see the
vignettes in the methodological appendix). With these stories I sought to
explore the ways people put their ideas oflove to use when they are trying
to resolve problems (see Strauss and Quinn 1997).
I wanted to understand not only what my interviewees thought
about love, but how they thought. I was interested in the varying views of-
ten held by the same people, and in the circumstances under which one
understanding would give way to another. Inspired by Lawrence Kohl-
berg's studies of moral reasoning (1981, 1984), I was interested not just in
the conclusions people drew but in the ways they brought together cul-
tural images, feelings, experiences, and ideas to think about a problem. I
wanted to know which views people would defend and which were only
casual impressions, and what experiences, even of the sort that people
normally do not articulate, grounded those views.
The effect of the interviews was to explore not only what people
thought but what resources they had for thinking about love. Indeed, in
the course of the interviews I began to realize that most people do not ac-
tually have a single, unified set of attitudes or beliefs and that searching for
such unified beliefs was the wrong way to approach the study of culture.
Instead of studying the views of particular individuals, I came to think of
my object of analysis as the cultural resources themselves-the traditions,
rituals, symbols, and pieces of popular people drew on in
thinking about love. I wanted to know how much people stretched the
limits of the cultural traditions they brought to bear on experience, and
how they combined or reappropriated elements of different traditions.
In exploring cultural traditions, I also interviewed ideological spe-
cialists- ministers and therapists-whose province it is to articulate the-
INTRODUCTION I 5
ories of love. I wanted to understand how the cultural conceptions pro-
moted by these experts were actually adopted by those who tried to use
them, and what alterations these lay users of therapy or religion made in the
process. I also soughtto trace the influence of novels and self-help books to
see how the popular culture oflove touched the lives of my respondents.
2
CULTURE
This study's approach to culture is unusual in several ways. Rather than
contrasting two or more groups with different cultural understandings of
love, or describing an exotic culture unfamiliar to most readers, it explores
the culture oflove among a relatively homogeneous group of middle-class
Americans. That is because it analyzes a different dimension of cultural life
than most studies of culture do.
This book explores variations in the way culture is used. The middle-
class Americans I interviewed draw from a common pool of cultural re-
sources. What differentiates them is how they make use of the culture they
have available.
Uses of culture vary. Some people (usually a small minority) try to
live ideologically pure lives. For them, every aspect of daily life must be
examined and made consistent with their beliefs. For others, most of life
is unexamined, although a rich set of cultural traditions, from wedding
anniversaries to bits of remembered advice from their mothers to the
lyrics of popular songs, may seem to make life more meaningful. And still
others are cynical about the culture most take for granted. This book ex-
plores such variations in the ways culture is appropriated, mobilized, and
linked to experience.
Culture's influence can be understood only when we have new ways
of thinking about how cultural materials are actually put to use. How do
people who share similar cultural understandings integrate them differ-
ently into their lives? One man may invest his adolescent ideal oflove with
greater and greater meaning as he matures, feeling ever more deeply that
his wife is his perfect sweetheart. Another may become disillusioned with
his earlier views, adopting a cheerful cynicism about love. The middle-
class suburbanites I interviewed draw largely on a common set of cultural
motifs, but they differ in the style and intensity of their cultural practices
and in the substantive meanings they derive from common cultural ma-
terials. It is this sort of variation I seek to understand.
Exploration ofthe varied ways culture is used can, I believe, reinvigo-
rate the study of how culture affects social life. If we wish to explain indi-
vidual action or wider social patterns in cultural terms, it will no longer
6 INTRODUCTION
do to say "Americans do it this way" or "the French do it that way" because
of their culture. Cultures are complex and contradictory, and even a com-
mon culture can be used in very different ways. Thus, effective cultural ex-
planation depends on understanding how culture is put to use.
In place of the traditional Weberian focus on "ideas" as the "switch-
men" that direct human motives, or Parsonian analysis of culture as norms
and values, contemporary analysts think of culture in semiotic terms, as
discourse; in structural terms as "schemas"; in performative terms as
"practices"; and in more embodied terms as "habitus." Contemporary
culture theorists focus less on what particular individuals think or believe
than on (1) how the larger semiotic structure-the discursive possibili-
ties available in a given social world-constrains meaning (by construct-
ing the categories through which people perceive themselves and others
or simply by limiting what can be thought and said) and (2) the ways the
material and social environment directly penetrates actors to shape their
habits and skills (Bourdieu 1977; Swidler 1986), their tastes (Bourdieu
1984), their emotional vitality (Collins 1981), or their embodied sense of
self and situation (Joas 1996). Other theorists have attempted to under-
stand how cultural meanings construct "social structure" itself. With very
different agendas, William Sewell Jr. (1992) and John Meyer (1983,1987)
have both tried to show how preexisting cultural schemas constitute such
apparently structural realities as factories, organizations, and nation-states.
This book examines how culture works by analyzing what middle-
class Americans say about their ideas and experiences oflove. But it does
not confine itself to such materials. It also addresses the grand sociologi-
cal tradition of cultural analysis, asking what new insights come from con-
sidering variations in cultural intensity and coherence and such processes
as the adoption, assimilation, and rejection of cultural materials.
OVERVIEW
The book proceeds in three broad steps. Part I, "Culture's Confusions,"
draws on interview materials to reexamine the standard ways sociologists
and other social scientists have thought about how culture works in the
lives of ordinary people. Chapter 1 considers how varied and sometimes
contradictory people's ideas about love are and how difficult it is to say,
for particular individuals or for a larger community, just what their cul-
ture consists in. Chapter 2 suggests that we think of cultures as "tool kits"
or repertoires of meanings upon which people draw in constructing lines
of action. Cultures inculcate diverse skills and capacities, shaping people
INTRODUCTION
7
as social actors, to be sure-by providing them tools for constructing
lines of action, not by molding them to a uniform cultural type.
Part II, "Culture from the Inside Out," looks in greater detail at the
ways people use culture to organize individual experience and action.
Chapter 3 examines the different forms culture takes-ranging from plat-
itudes, hypocrisy, and cynicism through faith, commitment, and ideologi-
cal conviction. By looking at variations in how deeply or systematically
people bring cultural understandings to bear on their experience, it raises
questions about whether more deeply held or more coherent understand-
ings affect experience and action more powerfully than superficial or inco-
herent ones. Chapter 4 proposes that the general approaches people de-
velop for dealing with life, what I call "strategies of action," are the crucial
nexus at which culture influences social action. The cultural repertoire a
person has available constrains the strategies she or he can pursue, so that
people tend to construct strategies of action around things they are already
good at. Chapter 5 continues the examination of how culture structures ac-
tion by comparing the way culture works in "settled" and "unsettled" lives.
Part III, "Culture from the Outside In," examines how three "exter-
nal" constraints on culture-codes, contexts, and institutions-mediate
culture's effects on action. Chapter 6 describes two contrasting ways in-
terviewees think about love-in mythic terms like those of the movies
and in prosaic-realistic terms stressing the messy complications of daily
life. It asks why both modes of thinking persist in the same people, and why
people sometimes use one mode and sometimes the other. Chapter 7 ex-
plores the consequences for middle-class Americans of thinking about
love as a free, individual choice. It shows that people derive very different
implications from the common vocabulary of American voluntarism, and
that even the common language of "choice" (and the related rejection of
sacrifice and obligation) can be made to support both commitment and
self-actualization. Chapter 7 then asks what institutional experiences re-
produce the discourse of voluntarism as the preferred way for Americans
to talk about love and commitment. Chapter 8 examines how culture,
which is often quite incoherent in the subjective experience of individu-
als, can nonetheless powerfully shape action. Well-publicized cultural
codes redirect action by I'eframing its meaning; contexts such as polarized
meetings or contested political arenas impose their own logic on ideas
and action; and institutional demands continually renew the plausibility
of cultural formulations people cqnsciously reject.
The conclusion turns to a set of broad questions about contemporary
empirical and theoretical work on culture. It lays out the larger questions
8 INTRODUCTION
that I believe the sociology of culture should address: whether and in what
senses culture is coherent or incoherent; what we mean when we claim
that something has, or is, a "cultural logic"; and whether some cultural el-
ements anchor or organize others.
This is a book about how ordinary people talk about love, both
when they have it and when they lose it. It is also, inevitably, a book about
what it means to be one kind of American. And finally it is a book that will,
I hope, force us to rethink our assumptions about the ways culture works
in shaping individual experience and in structuring collective action.
PA R T I
Cufture's Corifusions:
Who Wrote the Book cif Love?