Love burnout: young women, mobile phones, and delayed marriage in Yaoundé, Cameroon

Majczak, Ewa (2024) Love burnout: young women, mobile phones, and delayed marriage in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. ISSN 1359-0987

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Abstract

This article examines how work towards the promise of love marriage comes to be exhausted. It focuses on young urban women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, trying to ‘catch’ a husband using digital technologies in which photographs figure prominently. Focusing on the visual production of dating profiles, I show how mobile phones place young women at the centre of their own husband-catching pursuits. Through digital actions, these young women produce the promise of love marriage, but at the same time their actions require increased volumes of emotional work. As phones constantly compel young women to intensify their husband-catching efforts and amplify the promise of love marriage, they rarely bring the desired results. Thus, young women, burdened by the emotional work necessary to sustain this promise, experience a form of love burnout, suspend their actions, and delay marriage. In highlighting the emotional laboriousness of intimate relations in technologically mediated worlds, this article draws out the limitations of the way in which the promise of love marriage is circulated and points to how neoliberal economies of affect may be temporarily suspended.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author
Divisions:	Media and Communications
Subjects:	H Social Sciences H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
Date Deposited:	08 Apr 2024 13:36
Last Modified:	24 Apr 2024 09:33
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122562

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