We theorise ‘jagged love’ informed strongly by Zygmunt Bauman’s (2003) concept of ‘liquid love’
In short, the constituent events of the romance masterplot can be expressed in the form we gave in the introduction: two people meet, have sex, fall in love, marry, have children, and live happily ever after
(This is generally considered to be a fairly heteronormative plot; however, we have seen it mapped onto queer couples increasingly more in recent years, not least via inscribing queer leads into generally heteronormative forms of popular culture, such as the Hallmark-style Christmas rom-com.) Not all of these milestones must necessarily occur–a couple might not choose to ;but these are still generally considered exceptions rather than the rule. These constituent events are often framed in specifically temporal terms: for instance, a couple that has a child and then later ;out of order’, where ‘order’ refers to the chronology above. The chronological position of sex in the masterplot has become increasingly mobile since the twentieth century saw the view that sex should only happen within atically less prevalent. Broadly speaking, it was replaced by a view that romantic love should be a necessarily precondition for sex (especially for women); however, this is also becoming increasingly more complex (McAlister, 2020).
These temporal concerns regularly provoke anxiety. Angus McLaren (1999, p. 220) argues that ‘[t]here emerged in the twentieth century a “right time”… to reach sexual maturity, to lose one’s virginity, to ;. Because of its recent chronological mobility within the romance plot, among other things, sex is often the locus of a lot of anxiety about the ‘right time’. This is evident in a significant amount of the conversation around dating apps, especially when the baseline assumption is that people are using them to hook up.
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