You have full access to this open access article. We use Multiple Correspondence Analysis to capture the institutional logics of love and intimacy among a random sample of American university students.
Using survey data collected from a random sample of students from a large Pacific university PU we find that institutional logics of intimacy come in multiple forms: abstinence, loving sex and hookup sex, each characterized by its specific doings, feelings, and sayings. Constellations of meaningful practice, not distributions of capitals among persons, overwhelmingly organize the pathways of practice.
Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts , p. Romantic love is not just an individual emotion; it is an institutional formation, a long-standing organization of meaningful practice, the way something is done, an intelligible constellation of doing, saying and feeling between two people understood as an instance of love Coontz ; Latour ; Schatzki , p. Its operations appear scripted; their limited conventional sequences perdure Gagnon These constellations are complex; their elements mutually constitutive Breiger ; Breiger and Mohr The institutional ordering of love is manifest in the historical trajectories and cross-national differences of its practices and discursive formations, of what people do, feel and say while they are doing it or judging others doing it, the changing prevalence and nature of sexual and emotional intimacies within and outside of marriage, of patterns of courtship, cohabitation and marriage, and the gendering of all these Armstrong et al.
Institutional logics have an immanent intent, an internal telos. They are logics of practice not in the sense of rules of inference, the classical understanding of logic, but in terms of the reproductive regularities of production or enactment of specific non-phenomenal goods.
As a brutal reduction, we consider love a practice of care for another. By practice, we mean sets and sequences of corporeal doings, physical interactions including language and emotion, that are strongly associated with kinds of love. The institutional logics of love do not unfold in one pure form; there are various actualizations or enactments. Intimate practices take place in social fields permeated by multiple logicsβfamilial, religious, capitalist, gendered, racial, sexual, politicalβwhich can combine, co-constitute, distort, enhance or destroy one another, or be unreactive and inert towards each other.
