Sick love: dysfunctional couple dynamics (2018)

Sex, romantic relationships between tradition and alternative bonds, and the world of eroticism and transgression. Young Italians are divided between the desire to combine sex and feelings, preserving the traditional life of a couple, and the temptation to experiment with alternative forms of bonding, such as friendship in bed.
The cross-section that emerges from the detailed Eurispes survey on “Sex, eroticism and feelings: young people outside the box” suggests a wide range of assessments that do not automatically converge into a clear and single image. Moreover, it would be an illusion to seek uniformity in such a diverse context, in which different subjectivities weigh far more heavily than external rules and constraints, which are increasingly becoming less binding. Even in the field of sexuality – and in the relationships between this and emotional dynamics – the main actor is the individual who proceeds along with an individual and self-constructed path that, unlike what happened in the years of the building of mass society, is not affected so much by the ‘fashions’ and homologations proposed in and by the public context. Just as in the more general sphere of consumption, driven by hyper-individualised marketing, the mass individual has been replaced by mass individualism.