Alexandra Macht - The Social Construction of Masculine Emotions

Alexandra Macht

Fatherhood and Love

The Social Construction of Masculine Emotions

To my family

Larisa, Rzvan and Olivia

It is good to love many things, for therein lies true strength .

And whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, it is well done!

Van Gogh

Who taught you to love? The inscription welcomed me on the door of a Toronto-based apartment as I returned from giving a presentation on fatherhood and love to a small, yet enthusiastic, audience at the International Sociological Associations 2018 Conference. The question seemed apt, as it mirrored some of the thoughts I was investigating as part of my research on paternal love: Is love something we learn or is it an instinct? Why do we gender it? Why is romantic love so socially prominent? And why are other forms of love obscured in the analysis of everyday life? You are about to engage with a sociological analysis on love, which attempts to provide some answers to these questions, filtered as they shall appear through the narratives of a specific group of European fathers. Why is it important to explore paternal love in the realm of family relationships? One reason is that, so far, there are no extensive accounts of paternal love in sociology. While accounts of romantic love abound (Illouz ). Not only this picture is about a specific social-political landscape, tradition, culture and the representation of gendered bodies, but it is also about love. The love we shared and continue to do as family members. A love complicated by our combined biographies and multiple intersections (of age, gender and generation) and by our everyday lived experiences as members of a connected group, replete with the ideal images we continue to hold about what it means to be a family. This love incorporates power, as it speaks about a form of socialization done according to Romanian cultural and gendered norms and tied into specific cultural family practices.

Contrary to sociologists, psychologists provide significant analyses of familial love, by rather mysteriously refering to love in other terms, such as warmth or attachment (Lamb ) or to that of popular entertainment. However, this is no longer the case, and with the simultaneous rise in fatherhood studies, an interest in love studies could also be observed. The present research is unique because it has investigated, from a sociological perspective, the convergences of these two topics.

The data presented in this book was gathered between the winter of 2014 and the summer of 2015. Coincidentally, 2015 also marked the introduction of shared parental leave provisions in the UK, extending for employed fathers the short two weeks time they could take to look after their children, to a longer three-month period. In Romania, at the moment, fathers can only take 5 days once their baby is born, with the possibility of extending this to 15 days if they attend an infant-care course (Macht and Popescu ) and that it is not taking place uniformly across Europe.