Happily Ever After? Exploring U.S. Collegiate Women’s Understandings of Love as Impermanent and Timeless in the Age of Capitalism

This study examines the impact of popular cultural tropes and contemporary ideologies on U.S. collegiate women’s constructions of romantic love and marriage. Although research shows that shifts in the public sphere intimately affect the private realm, little is known regarding how young women negotiate concurrent romantic ideals and capitalist notions of romance. Based on interviews with 30 collegiate women, we argue that women’s negotiations of romantic love and marriage can be understood through conceptualizations of time, including investment of time, timelessness, and envisioning the future despite impermanence. Our findings suggest a love paradox, in that participants define love as controllable, reflecting late capitalistic terms of love as work and individuals’ responsibilities, and uncontrollable, as love is also deemed magical and timeless. Ambiguities thus arise from perceptions of instability, with women desiring idealized, everlasting love yet remaining doubtful that it can come to fruition in a rationalized, unstable time