The Romantic Self-Help Industry: A Selection from Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love (2017)
“The premise of the romantic self-help industry is that the problems we encounter in dating are individual. The history of dating reveals that the opposite is true. We inherit the roles we play in the theater of dating from those who came before us and take stage directions from those who live around us. Every person may experience intimate feelings intimately. But this does not mean that those feelings are merely individual. Our intimate feelings reflect the power of forces that shape every other aspect of our lives. The possibilities of how we feel arise from those we feel among.
Self-help literature usually ignores the fact that the frustrations that cause people to seek self-help are often not just their problems. They are social in origin. They do not lie somewhere deep within us but reflect the many relationships that constitute our world. Some authors acknowledge that sources of the dissatisfaction their readers experience lie outside their control. Yet once they have, they almost immediately push this fact aside. They say, Okay, but let’s focus on what you can do. Then they proceed to tell you how to adapt to get by as best you can with things the way they are.
This approach seems self-defeating when you consider that the goal is love—opening and merging your one life with the lives of others. Love requires openness. The point is to be changed by, and to witness change in, one another. Slowly, this back-and-forth transforms the shared reality we call the world. Love is less noun than verb: not a thing to get, but a process to set in motion. Yet many of the experts who take for granted that love is the highest goal of every life—the happy ending that will make all efforts worth it—seem to doubt the possibility of changing anything. Ironically, they place little faith in love itself.
I began to feel a need to write this book when I sensed that I was trying to make a life according to rules I did not understand and that the process had blinded me to my desires. Following my desires was supposed to be the point. Yet I had never reflected long enough to discover whether the feelings that I believed should be there actually were. I had no idea who I was. And as long as I kept impersonating all the women I thought I should be, I could not receive love, much less give it. I had no self to choose to give it from.
I did not know then what book I was writing. That became clear only as I read and talked with friends and strangers and began to notice that they, too, felt anxious and confounded by the roles that dating pushed them into. They were especially exasperated by how often these roles seemed to follow strictly gendered scripts that pitted them against their partners.
Through these conversations, I came to see that American culture sends deeply mixed messages about our courtship system. A huge number of products are devoted to depicting, discussing, and facilitating dating. An archaeologist unearthing our artifacts eons hence would have to conclude that it was a crucially important part of life in our civilization, if only from the number of dating apps on our disintegrating smartphones. Yet as a subject of inquiry, dating usually remains confined to venues marked as frivolous, like women’s magazines or romantic comedies. In practice, we treat it as recreation—an individual pursuit rather than a collective concern. The result has been to put an enormous amount of pressure on people to date, while providing little support for them.
As I neared the end of my research, where the history of dating caught up with the present, I began to notice that our culture has a similarly split attitude toward love. On the one hand, we fixate on it. Americans gorge on romance novels, sentimental movies, and bride-themed reality shows; couples take on debt to stage industrial-size weddings, then slog through years of costly therapy trying to keep the promises they made at them. On the other hand, we accept social arrangements that leave many people little time to devote to personal relationships. Images and narratives about love that we consume constantly reinforce the message that only certain kinds of love can count.
Self-help books, movies, and pop songs alike tend to focus on love that is romantic, monogamous, usually heterosexual, and ideally headed toward marriage and reproduction. The writer and activist Laurie Penny has dubbed this ‘Love™.’ I think of it as Love: The End, the final frame that supersedes all the awkward or heartbreaking scenes that came before and blots them gently away. ‘Nobody remembers anything about dating, once they’re out’ a married friend laughs. ‘It’s like we all have posttraumatic shock.’ Many single people speak of love as if it were an escape route or a prize they hope to get for making it through dating’s trials.
Some feminists claim that love is bad for us. In her book Against Love, the Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis argues that the ideal of a lifelong romantic relationship dupes its adherents into living lives in which they feel unfree and unfulfilled. ‘When did the rhetoric of the factory become the language of love?’ Kipnis asks. ‘When it comes to love, trying is always trying too hard: work doesn’t work.’ Kipnis celebrates the spontaneity of flirting and erotic play as a source of joy and growth. She sees compulsory monogamy as a tool of social control that renders Americans desexed and docile.
Women in particular are often exhorted to work at Love™ in ways that feel coercive. Both material realities and sexist socialization tell women that living without it will be worse for them than it would be for a man. Single women earn less money than their male counterparts; if they have children, they usually bear most of the responsibility and expense of raising them. While our culture may be becoming more comfortable with the idea that women might opt out of long-term coupledom, the figure of a spinster continues to elicit pity. By contrast, the image of the lifelong bachelor still exudes dusty glamour.
The problem that Kipnis highlights is not with love per se. The problem is with a world where Love™ is the only love going, and where structural inequalities compel the individuals who buy into it to put in different amounts of work. We may need more words for all the forms love can take.
The Ancient Greeks had three: eros, philos, and agape. These meant desire, friendship, and the love of God for the world he created. The Romans translated agape as caritas, ‘charity.’ Love can be given without expectation of return. We might start by being kinder and more generous toward ourselves. Women in particular must unlearn the ways that we are taught to devalue our own wishes and well-being—to see ourselves as too fat, too loud, too ambitious, too needy, and so on.
This book has shown how many of the things that trouble daters about their personal lives are more than personal. To improve them we would need to make the kinds of political changes that can be achieved only by banding together and organizing. Rather than directing the critical energies that we apply to self-help inward, if we directed them outward, we might come up with concrete fixes that could make dating—and much besides dating—better. If there were better health care, child care, and maternity leave policies, for instance, would dating on the biological clock be nearly as nerve-racking as it is now? If the demands of school and work were not so grueling, would young people feel so much pressure not to ‘waste time’ on relationships? Perhaps—or perhaps not. They would almost certainly feel freer to explore.
Our challenge is to find ways to honor love properly without falling back into outdated patterns. We might think of this as a third sexual revolution. We should certainly not corral sex back into marriage. Though I have criticized the ‘dating market,’ I am not saying that everyone should get out of it by ‘settling down.’ Rather, we must find ways to celebrate the myriad kinds of love that sex and romance lead to. We must be mindful, kind, and appreciative toward our partners. One of the things we ought to appreciate about them is the work they do in appreciating us.
The logic of transactions deep in the structure of dating encourages us to see love as something we compete against others to get. The illusion that we can only win love and never will it leaves many people feeling paralyzed. The way that our culture has divided labor and desire, assigning one to history and the other to biology, renders us helpless: It tells us that love is a mere feeling, fleeting and uncontrollable. If you see love as the most important event of your life and believe that you cannot influence it, of course any difficulties you encounter in a relationship will seem terrifying. Any problem you and your partner encounter means your feelings have already ebbed. But this way of seeing love and emotion as absolutely separate from labor is mistaken.
Love consists of acts of care you can extend to whomever you choose, for however long your relationship lasts. Over the past century, dating has changed, changing how people imagine they must be in order to be loved. As it has, love has not stood still. Love changes in time, too.
The point of recognizing the labor of love is not to reject it but to reclaim it, to insist that it be distributed equally and directed toward the ends that we in fact desire. In dating or a relationship, seeing the labor of love for what it is allows you to conduct a simple test: Is what you are doing worth it? How much do you want, and how much is too much to give? There is a difference between putting off something that is bothering you until a time when you are confident you and your partner can discuss it productively and burying it because you fear that admitting anger will make you undesirable. There is a difference between making constant demands on a partner and admitting when you feel vulnerable. The difference is exploitation. Love demands that we recognize and refrain from it.
When we have the freedom to direct the ways we perform it, labor is not a liability. It is a source of strength. Once we have clarity, we benefit from acknowledging the ways in which love itself is work. It is a productive force. In order to harness it, we must be vulnerable. To feel incomplete, and thus to yearn for others, always means being able to be hurt. It is through the fearful process of recognizing our needs and showing them to others that we grow.
I fell in two kinds of love while writing this book. The first was with a friend. We had crossed paths a few times before we met met—before something she said or I said over the kind of lunch date half-strangers politely schedule sparked and gave us a glimpse of our potential. In movies and on television, women often seem to treat their friendships as fallbacks, like focus groups they use to work through romantic problems and dissolve once they find a partner. But a passionate friendship can be just as powerful as a romantic passion. You turn the lens on your life just a bit and a whole new plane leaps into focus. Tilt the page and you see shapes you did not know were there. It was that friendship that inspired and sustained me as I wrote this book.
The second was with the person I have since married. To have come to know him and to know myself through him has been the greatest joy of my life yet. I had always feared that love would require ceding more of myself than I wanted, or would require losing my identity. It turned out that the opposite was true. It was through this relationship that I first came to see who I was and what happiness meant.
Both experiences took me by surprise. It was not only that they happened, as they say, when I least expected it. Love itself was not what I expected. It was not the end of a search but the beginning. In love, I began to feel desire as a movement in me that reached outward, yearning to act upon the world.
If we can be brave enough to honor love, we might begin to change all the things that people hate about dating. By treating the work of reproduction with the seriousness that it deserves, we might begin to see how productive—and truly creative—it can become. One thing is clear: Whatever we can do cannot be done alone.”—Moira Weigel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2017)
