Reading Heteropessimism: Painful Attachments in Contemporary Literary Fiction

From viral threads describing male partners’ incompetence at grocery shopping to TV shows like Fleabag , heteropessimism abounds in popular culture. Contemporary literary fiction is no exception. Yet little scholarly attention is paid to these cultural products as an entry point into social scientific engagement with heteropessimism. This article analyzes novels and their reception to systematically define heteropessimism and add to our understanding of how a literary public makes meaning about dissatisfying intimate life. I selected 12 novels about heterosexual relationships that were reviewed in the New York Times between 2017 and 2022; subsequently, I selected and coded 48 professionally authored reviews and 36 user-submitted Goodreads reviews to identify the most discussed themes. These themes reveal that experiences in relationships (‘input’) contribute to heteropessimism (‘output’). Writers and reviewers demonstrate anxiety about agency, as female protagonists defer to men, grapple with financial and psychological precarity, and make choices that seem to cut against their own welfare. These novels portray troubled relationships as issues of attachment (consistent with Lauren Berlant’s work on cruel optimism and intimate publics), rather than rational choice. Through this analysis of novels and their reviews, I produce a definition of heteropessimism as something distinct from cruel optimism; rather than a fantasy of the good life, heteropessimism entails women’s simultaneous assumption of their own disadvantage in heterosexual intimate life and their experience of strong attachment that constrains decisions. I conclude that the novels’ emphasis on the superintending role of attachment over choice challenges the notion that individual women should be able to solve relationship problems originating in structural disparities. This article contributes conceptually and empirically to cultural sociology and sociology of literature, gender, and sexuality, by using a corpus of novels and reviews to systematically define an idea from popular culture and critically examine contemporary heterosexuality.