The lost innocence of love - Romance as a postmodern condition

This article examines the relationship between 'mass media' representations of love and a model of love which we commonly view as more 'realistic', th at is more compatible with sharing everyday life with another. The article offers three arguments: (I) the postmodern claim that everyday life in gene ral and romantic love in particular have been colonized by the empty 'simul acrum' of mass media resonates with a long-standing Western discussion of t he problematic relation between fiction and reality; (2) the relation betwe en mass media representations of love and realistic models of love is recon ceptualized as deriving from two conflicting bodily experiences of love; (3 ) postmodern love is defined as being characterized by a particular crisis of representation in which signifiers and signifieds of love do not match.