Laurie Essig - Love, Inc.: Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter

I have a confession: I am a true romantic. I fervently believe in happily ever after and true love always. I am also a cynic. I have a sinking feeling that romance blinds us with fairy dust. I am afraid that romance will, metaphorically speaking, wear off at midnight, leaving us dressed in rags and missing one of our shoes. The romantic in me has spent a lifetime looking for the one while the cynic has spent nearly as long teaching and writing about romance from a critical perspective. Environmental collapse and a global transfer of wealth to the billionaire class cannot be solved by seeing someone across the room and feeling our hearts beat faster until we finally lean in for the kiss as fireworks go off in the background. I know that. Most people know that and yet, somehow, the promise of romance as a guarantee of future well-being has become increasingly powerful even as the future itself is increasingly insecure.

That is the argument of this book: that the worse things get, the more we turn to romance to feel hopeful about the future. It is not that capitalism causes romance, but rather that romance is both the most pleasurable and the most future-oriented escape from the grimness of globalized capitalism. Americans turn to a number of belief systems for sustenance: religion, nationalism, football. And some of these, like religion, even promise a better future in the afterlife. Yet romance promises us a better future in this life, with the added bonus of an enchantment of the everyday as we hunt for our prince or princess. After all, today could be the day we meet our true love or maybe we are already with our true love and didnt realize it until today. We turn to romance because romance can make our lives better, more bearable, and more sustainable. We turn to romance because unlike having religious faith or even supporting the Jets, only a terrible cynic could begrudge us love.

At the risk of being a terrible cynic, however, I want to point out that romance is a privatized solution to what in fact are structural and global threats. Im not arguing that married people are less likely to engage in political change, but rather that people who believe that romance will allow them to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after, many of them single, are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. True love can no more solve our future than nationalism can. It can only distract us from what we really need: a realistic sense that our future is collective and is seriously endangered at this point in history. Our love affair with romance is like any dysfunctional relationship: the worse things are, the more we believe in the power of romantic love to fix it. When Donald Trump became president of the United States, many Americans insisted that love trumps hate and that love will win. I was too disheartened to respond with that sort of optimism. I looked at this book project, nearly done at the time, and asked myself: Who cares? Why offer a critique of romance as a dangerous ideology when there are far more dangerous ones that now have a place in the White House, ideologies like white nationalism and a worship of wealth and conspicuous consumption? But the worse things got, the more I realized that romance actually is the problem, or if not the problem, a problem. Romance lulls us into focusing on our love life rather than politics. Romance teaches us to turn away from the public sphere, to not think about the world, but to focus instead on our relationships and our families. And even when we know the world is bigger than that, even when the world intrudes on us with white nationalists taking over the streets of Charlottesville and global warming producing monster hurricanes on our coasts, we still hold onto the fantasy that true love will save us. Im not saying that despair causes romance, but rather that romance is a balm for our battered world.