Systemic Thinking and Intimacy Sociology—Open Questions on Contemporary Love

Abstract

Generally, men and women bind themselves driven by what they name love. Creative and identity-renewing exaltation, a revolutionary force that suddenly makes the insipidness of one’s life visible, love is a profound emotion. The transition from love to loving, from love as pure emotion to active love in a relationship, marks the difference between yesterday’s lovers and today’s lovers, over time and in societies, highlighting the social form of intimacy. What, then, is the “form” of contemporary love? Do the risks that characterize today’s intimate life mean that love has now become emptied of meaning, sucked into the semantic code of a “light” and “inconsistent” love, as Bauman seems to want? Or is there another interpretative possibility, on the line that runs from Luhmann to Giddens up to Beck? Paradoxically, is it perhaps that love seems to have no meaning because it has “too much” meaning? In the framework of the relationship between Systems Theory and Intimacy Sociology, the paper addresses these questions, revisiting to this purpose, the morphogenesis of love in the transition from solidarity without choice to solidarity without consent.