Why Love Hurts

the latter arises from a tacit comparison of one’s everyday life to the core of one’s general and fuzzy narrative expectations about how one’s life should be.

became plagued by the problem of navigat-ing between imagined expectations and the limitations of daily life.

not only disappointment, but the anticipation of disappointment that is a modern feature of love

Another way to say that modern relationships lack emotional security is to say that they are always on the verge of disappointment.

membership in a rigidly organized society may deprive the individual of opportunities to exercise his particular gifts, it gives him an emotional security which is almost unknown among ourselves

Reinhart Koselleck argues, modernity is characterized by the increasing distance between reality and aspiration,32 which in turn generates disappointment and makes it a chronic feature of modern lives

their capacity to transform reality into a disappointing experience.

can say that a part of our emotional socialization is fi ctional: we come to develop and anticipate feelings through the repeated cultural scenarios and stories we encounter

in secular cultures, love defi nes both the meaning and the goal of existence

Keith Oatley proposes two defi nitions of identifi cation:
Meaning 1 is recognition