As someone who is in need of relationship advice, I sat down with sociology professor Kathryn Lively, who teaches a course designed for would-be romantics: WGSS 33.07: “Love, Romance, Intimacy and Dating.” Lively taught the course last fall and will teach it again this coming fall. It is a discussion-based class where the final project involves interviewing a peer about their experiences with love, dating and intimacy. Whether you’re single and desperate or blissfully coupled, Lively has advice on how to keep romance from flatlining.
How did you come up with the idea for this сourse?
KL: Years ago, I was offering a qualitative methods class and one of the professors at the time in the sociology department said, “You teach interesting topics, you should just pitch something that you think will sell.” So I made up this course title — “Love, Romance, Intimacy and Dating.” The class has really evolved over the years. It’s always been a serious class because I wanted it to have a serious research component. I know that on the surface, it looks like it’s a fun class, but it’s a very serious class in the end — it’s fun and serious.
What scholarship has influenced the central questions that guide the course?
KL: I think the scholar whose work really helps me frame the entire thing is Eva Illouz and her book “Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation.” It takes a capitalistic critical stance, not about love itself, but what love has become in a consumer culture. It talks a lot about how marketing has taken things over technology, the illusion of endless supply, which makes it hard for people to settle.
Illouz brings in a lot. She brings in psychotherapy, Karl Marx, symbolic interaction. She’s an amazing author, and I’ve started with that question: “Why is love hard?” because everyone wants love and yet very few people [can] actually find it. By looking at that question, we begin to look at some of the cultural and structural trends, which is why this is such a difficult question for a lot of people.
How do you think the course impacts students? Do you aim to address campus culture surrounding love, romance and intimacy?
KL: We certainly talk about it. There’s one week that we spend digging into Lisa Wade’s book “American Hookup.” I also assign some different readings from academic journals that are a bit more recent. And there’s a lot of room for discussion. At least with this part of the course, students are really the experts. I can get them the frameworks and the theories of how sociology looks at these things and how they think about it, but I also really want to hear from the students.
In the class that I taught last time, there was such amazing diversity in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, social class and relationship status. So it was really interesting and important for students to be able to hear how people from a wide variety of circumstances are experiencing the campus culture. The impact is that people get a lot more insight.
We’re in a very difficult moment for long-term relationships. Capitalism is very individualistic — it’s very market-oriented and that has reached its tentacles into the most profoundly personal experience that an individual will ever have. I think that’s an important understanding that students walk away with.
Are Dartmouth students doing it wrong when it comes to love and dating?
KL: It’s the environment that is problematic and students are responding rationally. Most Dartmouth students are going to go on to advanced degrees. They’re gonna go on to jobs that require them to work a lot. And so you don’t actually want to get tied down. What’s happening in the current environment is very much a rational response to changing economic, structural and cultural expectations.
Everyone thinks, “I’m gonna meet someone online.” But there are certain things — and yes, the majority of people do meet online — about being online which makes it very difficult to meet anyone. There’s this idea that there’s an endless possibility and everyone’s looking at these curated perspectives of people. And if the person who’s right in front of you is not hitting all your buttons like right away, it’s really tempting to pull the phone out and swipe for another person. But you’re just looking at their curated thumbprint. And that’s not who they really are.
What was your goal when building “Love, Romance, Intimacy and Dating?” Have you learned anything new since beginning to teach this course?
KL: I could probably learn more than the students, honestly. I had students do their own independent research project and we had them do poster sessions. People did such interesting projects, things that I never would have considered.
But there’s also a blog component, which that’s where a lot of the action in this class happens. I ask students to write blogs on both their experience with the reading, but also about things that are going on like in the real world, in the culture, in media, in their own experiences. Those blogs are gold because I get to see a small slice into students’ lives and their understanding about what it is like for someone, your age, to be facing these things.
Do you think everyone should take this course? If yes, why?
KL: I think it has applicability to everyone. I know how painful it is when relationships go bad and breakups go bad and how personally people take it. And this class is not really an “it’s not your fault” class, because yes, people can make stupid mistakes in relationships. But it puts it in a broader social, historical and cultural context. And so it’s like, “Oh, it’s not just me — maybe this is just the way Dartmouth is organized, maybe it doesn’t have to be like this for the rest of my life.”
If you’re completely happy in your relationship, you’ll learn things about how to have better relationships. If you’re not happy in a relationship or you haven’t been able to find one, this course might give you a little bit of guidance and advice on why that is. And in ways that allow you to see the structures, to see the traps and hopefully to avoid them.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
