A never ending story? : romantic love in north-american tv series

Our perception of love in the Western world has been informed by literary ideas generated over the last eight hundred years. At this time, the semantics of love developed parallel to the liberation of the individual from traditional social structures. Romantic love is exclusive and eternal, spiritual and physical, and it serves one goal: to enable the fragmented individual to experience his own self. The literature of the 1920s developed a radical counter-model.

Consequently, the function of love had to change: men and women were to weigh rationally the practical advantages and disadvantages of their relationships for everyday life - the concept of partnership. But who is reinventing love today? Based on her analysis of 25 North-American TV series, this paper claims that romantic love usually trumps, at the latest in the last episode of the series. Since Girls (2012-17), however, new patterns have been emerging as more and more series present models of love and life that diverge considerably from pure romance [Publisher's text].