Love in the Age of Anxiety: Intimacy and Alienation in Contemporary Fiction

In modern literature, love and close relationships are getting more complicated, subtle, and insecure. This essay looks at how the theme of love is shown in today's society, which is mentally unstable because of widespread worry, loneliness, and broken relationships. This study uses modern writers' works, like those by Sally Rooney, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to look at how characters deal with love while dealing with mental illness, social standards, and technology. A qualitative textual analysis is used to look at how these books reflect and criticise real-life worries, especially those that have to do with being alone, emotionally distant, and afraid of commitment. The paper uses Freudian and philosophical frameworks, mainly the works of Freud, Lacan, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, to show how love, which was once seen as a source of comfort, is now a place of fight. This study shows that modern writing not only shows how fragile close relationships can be in a confusing world, but it also questions the very basis of human connection. Through looking at character development, story structure, symbolic language, and academic theories, this paper shows how the worries of the 21st century have changed the way love relationships work in fiction.