The anxiety of romantic love in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

This article examines the role of anxieties about romantic love in the modernist self-making projects of Vietnam's growing middle class. Romantic ideals and discourses that emerged from Vietnam's neoliberal reforms emphasize personal compatibility through emotional intimacy and communication. Middle-class residents of Ho Chi Minh City increasingly privilege the emotions in daily life and define themselves and their relationships in an affective register. This cultivation of emotional self-reflexivity has, however, become a source of anxiety about the self. An analysis of two case studies traces how individuals draw on their class, gender, and age to negotiate conflicts between various models of love and selfhood and reinvent romantic discourses to claim their own versions of a modern identity. A critical component of both the experience of romantic love and the construction of middle-class Vietnamese selfhood, love anxiety stems not just from people's changed relations to others but also from a changed perception of the self, which has been rendered unrecognizable to them.