Romance and Amatonormativity - Why Love is Our New Commodity

Eric Fromm argues that love often fails because society has commodified and objectified it, turning it into a transactional and superficial experience. He suggests that love should be seen as an art and a verb, requiring practice, patience, and selflessness. Fromm challenges the idea that romance is the only valid form of love and criticizes the societal pressure to conform to traditional relationship norms. He urges individuals to cultivate a deeper, more inclusive form of love that connects them to humanity as a whole. I want to start this with a quote. Quote. There's hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly as love. End quote. Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving. What did Eric Fromm mean by this? It seems quite obvious what he's saying. Love fails. But is this just the way it is? Is this just another part of human nature that can't be helped? Are we destined to suffer this way? Quote. Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. End quote. Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving. But it fails, Fromm. What are you getting at? Let's take a step back. Who is Eric Fromm, and why should we listen to him? Well, first of all, Eric Fromm was a prominent figure of the Frankfurt School. Okay, what's the Frankfurt School? For the sake of the argument, I'll very unjustifiably distill down the Frankfurt School to one concept. Critical theory. You see, since this period in the western history of philosophy called the Enlightenment, people have been trying to use rationality to unveil the ultimate truth in the universe, to understand and control things around us. The Frankfurt School calls this kind of thinking traditional theory. Traditional theory aims to understand and control. But critical theory is nothing like that. Quite the contrary. Critical theory aims to liberate. Liberate us from the dogmas that's taken for granted for thousands of years of history, the ones whose oppressive nature had never been questioned. These are social hierarchies, conventions, unspoken verbal contracts concerning, for example, economic classes and genders and sexes. But love is another social convention that's, in my opinion, almost never taken into our gladiatorial arena called public discourse and attacked and re-evaluated. What's more, what kind of a heartless creature would do such a thing? But just as holy doctrines of the past shouldn't be immune to criticism, it's time to put love on trial. So, what are we liberating ourselves from, Eric, from? Let's see, there's another theme in the Enlightenment-style thinking. Humans are great. Humans as rational beings. Humans with great agency. Humans with souls. Humans that understand and conquer the world as we know it. We humans have used our reason to break the world down to neat categories of objects, and after that, we take them for granted. One of those objects, if you ask, from, is love, or rather, pseudo-love. Quote, love is a relatively rare phenomenon, and its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love. Pseudo-love is what we think is love proper. It is a noun, it is a feeling, it is passive, static, objective, easy, something that simply happens to you. We fall in love. We believe in love at first sight. We believe that at some point in our lives, true love will arrive. Love finds a way. We even believe in the one and only. There is only one true love. But really, how true is true love? Just like when Plato said, there is only one true tree, one true rock, one true human being up in the sky somewhere. Just like Christianity, for example, which demands a heart so pure that not even one out of place thought is allowed if you really want to get into heaven. Love feels like one of the immobile, objective, ultimate truths of the enlightenment, a thing so sublime that the tiniest impurity attracts blame and shame. And this is the love that fails. To understand why he fails, let's take a look at the Frankfurt School for some more. Bear with me here, I swear this is going somewhere. What is the Frankfurt School most critical of other than enlightenment-style thinking? Capitalism. Capitalism is bad not just because Marxism is right about surplus values and exploitation. Capitalism is also a cultural paradigm that dictates how we look at the world. Yes, capitalism also shaped our conception of love. Before I start piling it on about capitalism, one thing to be clear. If you're at the moment a proponent of the enlightenment-style disinterested truth and free will, or if you're a proponent of capitalism, don't worry, I won't and probably can't take that away from you today, but I think we should agree that it does not hurt to be critical of your beliefs and hear the other side of the story. Also, no one from the Frankfurt School, nor am I, saying that anything is bad in and of itself. If you read ahead, you'll see this thing a lot. To Erich Fromm, love itself really is innocent, but our society isn't. The definition of a word changes all the time, dependent on the culture it's in, and society is our focus here if the historically contingent definition ends up doing more harm than good. That said, if you think it's a stretch to relate capitalism to love, bear with me as we first take a look at the capitalist mode of production. What is the capitalist mode of production? Commodities. Every human need is commodified, and, at least to many people's belief, able to be addressed by commodities. You're hungry? Go to the supermarket, and BAM, supply meets demand. You come home with some $20 vegan tofu and cucumber sandwiches. You're unpopular? Go to Amazon, and BAM, supply meets demand again. You get some Air Jordan sneakers that everyone likes. Don't forget that when you want cash, your demand will also meet supply as you sell your old books on eBay. But what if you're lonely? Go to the gym, advance your career, learn to play the ukulele, drastically change how you look, internalize certain personality traits so that you're more attractive to others, primp and package yourself, and make yourself a commodity in the personality market. And don't forget there's your demand, too. You handpick a specific set of personality traits for your seller, like a shopping list. Your partner would have to be loyal, your partner would have to be gentle, your partner would remember your birthday and the anniversary and Valentine's Day and your parents' birthday and all these great numbers on the Gregorian calendar. And if they don't, red flag, red flag, alas, they're not the one. Put them back on the shelf. You see, this is the love that fails, according to Eric Fromm, a kind of transaction that only exists because two people, yes, two people, get together because of each other's own self-centered needs. Under this love, we don't actually love each other, we just love the ideas of each other. Ideas that are often objective, consistent, and imagined. Our exchange value is more valuable than our use values. How we appear in a society becomes who we are to ourselves. Love in popular culture is a commodity. A relationship, accordingly, is employment. Think about it. Seen these ads for guitar-learning apps? Well, when you buy a guitar on a whim, thinking of that one favorite song you're gonna play with it, chances are that guitar will be sitting on a pedestal collecting dust four months later, and that app is not gonna help. That's what happens when love is a commodity. If you're not happy together after four months of sex life, impressive, or one year of living together, what good is it to sign up for being a couple when a commodity is designed to be replaced by new desires? You can't find a guitar-learning app to renew your subscription for a partner. You're done. If your relationship is built on a mutually beneficial transaction, chances are that eventually scratching each other's back can get uncomfortable and even painful if it's done for too long. By the way, just see how easy it is for love to not meet our demand after a while. Just because of some natural diversion of attention, you call it a betrayal, and you're having your heart broken for it? Come on! Insecurity is not better just because you can put it in a song. Not only that, hey, love is also sold to us as such. Think of all the love movies, songs, and TV series you can think of, Disney, The Bachelor, love songs that repeat, you are mine, 28 times per verse, love sales. Can you really be surprised when society sees love exactly the way how the media sees it? Let's face it, how we see love isn't the ultimate truth. More accurately, it is profit maximization. I want to take a moment and address just how much this love has shaped and changed different genders of people in this heteronormative society. For one example, do you see a trend of feminine men or femme boys being more and more popular? These are the boys that are designed by girls, pleading face emoji, and are supposed to subvert the gender stereotypes of toxic masculinity. But how much progress it is, really, if men merely went from one stereotypical expectation to another stereotypical expectation, when they're just changing who they are to meet your demand in the personality market? Alright, so our perception of love is horrible. Do you think it ends here? No, it doesn't. Love is way more horrible than this. Let me explain. I don't know if you've noticed by now, so far I've used the word love to say a very specific kind of love, romance. And I can rest assured you know what I'm talking about. Okay, but how is that bad? Let's think about it this way. Picture the concept of family in your head. What many people see is a nuclear family, a hardworking father, a caring mother, and happy children. But what does that model leave out? Well, all other kinds of family, of course. Families that don't have two people of the opposite sex as parents, for example. This is heteronormativity, the public consensus that heterosexual relationships and family are the default. Homosexual people are the odd ones out. In a similar way, among all kinds of love, we also have one default love, romance. Romance is natural. Romance is human nature. Romance is a crucial life experience. Romance is the best part of being a human, and if you haven't experienced it yet, that's because your prince in shining armor, or your princess in a tower, or your non-binary majesty in a... you get the idea... hasn't arrived yet. Romance, as we usually see it, is love itself. This whole romance as the default love paradigm we're living under, and this is far from our original concept, is called amatonormativity. Amatis is Latin for loved, and normativity simply means societal norms. Coined by Elizabeth Brake, amatonormativity is defined as the assumption that all human beings pursue love or romance, especially by means of a monogamous, long-term relationship. You can see where this is going, right? Right off the bat, what about single people? If someone is well over 30 and single, what do we expect? I'm so sorry to hear that. They must be lonely. She'll be like one of those old cat ladies who live with her 20-plus cats, as if that's a bad thing. But that's not all. This assumed human nature that everyone wants romance also gives romance a very specific kind of love, more undue emphasis over other kinds of love. If a boy and a girl, whatever those words mean, are very close to one another, what do we expect? They're dating! See, many of us have a hard time accepting that a non-romantic relationship, like friendship, can be just as valid and strong as romance, if not more so. Just know, there is always a hierarchy of love, with romance at the top. Consider the fact that, for many, many people, especially men, I love you would feel like an out-of-place thing to say to your best friend or even your mom. One reason being, by default, love is interpreted as romantic. And I bet when I said best friend, I evoked an image of two friends of the same sex for many of you. Amatonormativity intersects with many other social normative expectations, like heteronormativity that we talked about. It is already the air we breathe. Of course, none of this is to deny the joy and happiness of the quote-unquote conventional romantic love. If you're alloromantic, meaning that you're able to feel romance, yes, the other kind of people exist, if you're monogamous, if you love your partner dearly, you know the value of foregoing short-term gratifications for long-term, and you want to build the life for yourself that involves that deep connection that you can only have with someone that you've been with for a long time. More power to you! But as you can imagine, this narrow description doesn't fit everyone. In other words, not everyone will be happier if they find a partner or get married. What's more, I hope you can see how these outliers would feel when our judgments are cycled back to them. If I can't find my love, maybe there's something wrong with me. Sounds familiar? That's what homosexual people have been saying throughout history. But you're wrong if you think the victims of amatonormativity are only an unlucky minority. Far from it. The thing is, Jack, romance isn't always a force of good, even when it happens. Romance works in mysterious ways. But what have the scientists been doing this whole time? Allow me to introduce you to the 58th obscure jargon of the day, limerence. L-I-M-E-R-E-N-C-E, limerence. Defined by Lynn Wilmot and Evie Bentley as an acute onset, unexpected, obsessive attachment to one person, i.e. the limerent object. Basically, limerent is what we may call falling in love. The limerent object, or L-O for short, is the object person, the idea of the person that you fall in love with. Basically, it's what we call your crush. While we tend to think of falling in love as a dream come true, limerence in psychology is characterized by ruminative thinking, anxiety and depression, temporary fixation, and the disintegration of the self, sometimes even leading to stalking and self-harm. Some sources even trace and get back to childhood neglect and trauma. Limerence, according to many psychologists, can often be seen as a mental illness. I mean, we don't even hide it. Everyone knows love is crazy. I mean, you don't even know the person, and you feel like they can solve all your problems, that you are too scared to even live in the world without them, so you try very hard to get into good graces of them, even if it means you'll have to change who you are. Come on, that's a recipe for disaster! But the TV doesn't teach us that, does it? But the harm of amatonormativity is so, so much deeper than that. Yes, yeah, yeah, I know. This is the last time I do this. I swear. Let's try the imagination experiment again. When you picture romance in your head, very likely these two heterosexual people aren't just in love, they're married, or on their way to being married. Think of two people of the opposite sex, that are not related, living together, but not married. What do we commonly think of them? Weird. What are they? Are they even couples? Are they actually just friends with benefits? Right off the bat, as we have said before, you basically can't have any close friendship with the opposite sex. You have to be married. That is your final destination. As the famous Chinese saying suggests, if your romance isn't aiming for marriage, it's sexual harassment. Society has our lives all figured out. After you find out who your one and only other half is, you flirt, then you go on a date, then you have sex, then you become a couple, then you move in together, then you get married, then you buy a house, then you have children. It is a relationship escalator. The first thing about an escalator is that it seems to make it so easy. To society, romance is supposed to be easy. When you find it, you've got it. You will be complete, married with your better half happily ever after. But really, is that how things are? Well, first of all, statistics would disagree. 50% of married couples get a divorce in the US. And not to mention, what does that say about the other 50%? No, romance is hard AF, buddy. Buckle up, you're in for a storm. Another thing about an escalator is that you don't go back. Once you're on, there is only going up. If you're happy together, that's fine. But if you aren't, hoo-wee, you're in a world of pain. Think about how all your relatives, your colleagues and your parents will see you if you get a divorce. You're unhappy together, and if you get a divorce, everyone will know you're unhappy together. So you stay together. If social pressure isn't enough, consider the laws. To quote Elizabeth Brick, marriage, quote, entitles spouses to benefits, it constructs and protects spousal privacy, it limits exit options, and in some jurisdictions, it brings exemptions from sexual battery charges. Its legal effects can be life-saving or fatal. Entitlement to health insurance, or legal access rights for an abusive spouse, end quote. The same time you get easier taxes and better insurance deals, you also by chance get your abusive partner the right to screw you over when they know full well that you don't have money for a lawyer, that you don't want to look bad by going to court, that you'll probably blame yourself anyway. See, amatonormativity doesn't just make people miss out on the little things. No. On a completely dystopian level, when coupled with the cultural and legal ramifications of marriage, it can also harm, brutalize, and kill. I bet one thing's been on your mind during this whole time. So, what now? You've done it. Love is terrible. But what good it is to say so when there's nothing to be done? Good news! There are things to be done. Things that will not only make your life much more fruitful, but also help society move forward. So let's go back to whoever started all this. Eric Fromm. In his book, The Art of Loving, Fromm offers us an alternative love. The love that is not a commodity, not a feeling, not a noun. No. To Eric Fromm, love is supposed to be a verb. His book is called The Art of Loving. It is an action that he can choose to partake. In other words, you shouldn't try to be as lovable as possible. You should try to be as loving as possible. Love is something to learn from, cultivate, practice with great patience, and endure with great pain, too. If someone just copies the phone book on a napkin whenever they feel like it, do we call them a writer? If someone refuses to practice for any prolonged period of time and play the guitar they just bought like a chimpanzee on bongo drums, do we call them a guitarist? No and no. Everyone can write, but not everyone is a writer. Everyone can play around with a guitar, but it takes way more for someone to play it like a guitarist. To Fromm, loving is the same way. It is an art that requires practice, patience, and a healthy dose of suffering. An app like SimplyGuitar can't make you a guitarist. Only you can. And if you aren't ready to suffer from blisters on your fingers, you shouldn't want to have it to yourself. What's more, as you might have told by now, loving isn't object-oriented. According to Fromm, loving is all-encompassing. You see, technically, when you know another person, that person to your consciousness is always an idea. If you love one person but not others, you're technically in love with a particular idea of that person, and to an extent, the idea is your own choice for your own gain. This would easily be pseudolove again. According to Fromm, you are not able to love anyone if you are not able to love everyone, even the bad ones. This is how difficult and rare love is supposed to be. But don't forget, it is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. According to Fromm, the problem of human existence is that we're born separate from each other, and humans need to connect to something or someone else to feel less alone. But instead of taking pleasure in contractual pseudolove ultimately powered by your selfish needs, you would have to master the art of loving. When you do, you're connected not to an objectified and commodified idea which denies another person's subjectivity, but to humanity and this beautiful world. So next time when you cross-reference someone's Tinder bio with your shopping list, consider if you're able to love them all the while asking nothing in return. But then again, why would you be on Tinder if that's the case? So that's how you undertake the art of loving. Thanks, Mr. Fromm. What about amatonormativity in society? Well, that's easier, believe it or not. Acknowledge and help others to acknowledge the diversity and authenticity of love, love that stretches way beyond romance. Knock romance off its pedestal and open your eyes and arms to all ways human can bond together, not the least of which is simply being friends. Acknowledge that many single people might be much happier on their own. Acknowledge the existence of aromantic people that can't understand, imagine or experience romance like others do. Acknowledge the polyamory relationships and leave that judge at the back of your head behind. Tell others that art shouldn't be formulatic. Tell others that you're just glad they're happy. If we try hard enough, we will get more and more people into the art of loving. And who knows? Maybe significant changes will follow. We will be liberated from love. So next time someone tells you that you are incomplete as a single person, that you don't know what love is because it hasn't arrived yet, or that you're weird for not dating or marrying your friend, I want you to grab them by the shoulders, look them dead in the eyes and say, I am already married to justice. Thank you for listening. I love you. Yes, I do. I love you. If you break my heart, I'll die. So be sure that it's true when you say I love you. It's a sin to tell a lie. Be sure it's true when you say I love you, honey. Because you got just enough to know it's a sin to tell a lie. A whole lot of folks' hearts have done been broken just over a whole lot of foolish words that's spoken. I love you. Yes, I do. I love you. If you break my heart, I'll die. So be sure it's true when you say I love you. It's a sin to tell a lie.