El amor y el tiempo social: un amor sin tiempo

Abstract

Affective relationships are inseparable from time, which can be of two types, objective, real or historical and subjective. I am going to deal here with the first, insofar as it is the one that historically models love and configures its existence, its attitudes and its practices. Three dimensions are analyzed – the conception of social time in modernity, the history of love, and love in modernity – starting from a sociology of love combined with comprehensive or interpretive Weberian sociology. I will try to reveal the “correspondences in meaning” or the “elective affinities” existing between love and time. In this sense, my starting hypotheses are (1st) that the love story in the West is the result of three processes – the construction of a temporal narrative, an utopia and a tension between passion and marriage – and (2nd) that in modernity there have been two types of love - romantic and confluent. Finally, the article will conclude that the two modern ways of loving do not have time, since, due to the push of the individualization society, the temporal narrative that connected the past, the present and the future and that was traditionally built by love romantic has been broken; and to the extent that the fragile confluent love does not seem to have time to mature.