Love is Dead (…in late stage capitalism)

I mean love is dead in the Nietzsche-esque, ‘God is dead’ sense. Not so much in the black nail polish, swept fringe, MySpace sense. 

The full quote is as follows: ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ It hits. 

I can’t help, despite my best attempts, to feel this way about romantic relationships in our current times. But the ‘we’ that killed love isn’t strictly you or I,  it’s capitalism and Silicon Valley. Maybe you could argue capitalism is what motivates Silicon Valley, in which case the entire blame lies at capitalism’s door. Which isn’t much good, as capitalism is an economic system and therefore can’t verbally say sorry.

Silicon Valley is to blame for dating apps. I used to be on two of them, but as my frontal lobe developed and I had the realisation I don’t think I like dating, I deleted them (full disclosure, when I’m hungover and feeling emotionally vulnerable I redownload hinge for a little virtual ego-boosting and hate myself after. Like the dating equivalent of masturbating to porn).

I don’t think I dislike dating actually. I think I hate expectation. And going on a date with someone you met on dating apps is the epitome of expectation. The elephant in the room is that you both know why you’re there; you met on fucking tinder or whatever. And it starts to feel less like a fun evening with another person and more like a sex-motivated, two-way job interview where you both just want to know if this will be a waste of time or not. 

That’s something you hear a lot on dating shows. ‘He has wasted my time’ when, for example, the male suitor told the female suitor that he liked her, and then a week later decided a different female suitor is more appropriate and thus leaves his original partner. This rhetoric has always bothered me. If you both liked each other for that bit of time, and made each other laugh, or feel comfortable, or you learn from each other, maybe have a kiss or something more, and you enjoyed it, how on earth is that a waste of time? Maybe I’m being naive, but those things sound exactly like how a lot of people would like to spend their time. So, it didn’t materialise, or last longer than it did. So what? All there is is now, and now, and now. This is, again, capitalism manifest. This subjective, unquantifiable human experience didn’t provide me with anything tangible at the end of it. This relationship didn’t materialise into a ring on my finger, or three beautiful children, or I didn’t get the satisfaction of showing my followers how fit my bird is. Therefore it is a waste of time. 

You might be wondering how I’ve managed to blame dating apps for the commodification of romance. To that I ask, have you been on these things? Tinder is a fruit machine; instead of dollar signs and cherries it’s all of the single people within a 15 mile radius of you between the age ranges you set. It’s the clothes rails at a Primark, swiping left or right between objects of desire, occasionally picking one up when you like the look of it, only to put it back when you see it likes hiking on the weekends, or costs over £25. Dating apps are human market stalls, reducing entire human beings down into a single image, or at best, if we like the look of each other, a string of carefully thought out, vapid text messages of nothingness, because we’ve all been trained into believing our authentic selves are awful. That’s why there’s entire books written about ‘being your authentic self’ because none of us know how to do it anymore. 

When my parents were young and dating people, they weren’t thinking about the future. They followed what felt good, and if they liked someone they met at the disco tech that night, they knocked on their door the following day, or rang their house phone and had to endure the embarrassment of speaking to their parents. It was awkward and rosy-cheeked and authentic. They weren’t sat in restaurants on dates, wondering how long it’ll take for one of them to get ghosted, or to propose, or whether or not to soft launch on their instagram. They didn’t have a five-year-plan, or six different social media profiles of their crush dating back to 2009 they could scroll through, gathering information and old photos of exes or dead childhood pets. They just lived. 

Don’t get me wrong, the 80s isn’t without its massive faults. My parents were white, able bodied and straight. I’m not glorifying ‘the good old days’ at all, I’d still rather be alive now than then. But I just wish there was another way to ‘do’ love that doesn’t involve manifesting texts back by paying an Etsy witch, nude photos that disappear in 10 seconds, or whoring myself out on the virtual courtship meat-market of an app made by a faceless multi-million pound tech company. 

Social media has made us acutely aware of the fact there’s so many fucking people in the world. There’s loads of us. Our caveman brains can only cope with knowing about 500 people in our entire lives, and we scroll past more than that in half a day. This has led to the idea that there’s always someone better. You might be dating me right now, but you’re keeping an eye out for, maybe, a slimmer woman. Maybe she’s got a smaller nose than me, or a tighter pussy. Like Lana Del Rey says, why wait for the best when I can have you? He can’t fuck, say, Kylie Jenner (or even anyone close) so he loves me. Subscribes to Bonnie Blue’s Onlyfans or watches hentai or CNC porn and barely manages to tolerate everything else in the physical realm. 

In my opinion it’s true there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. But I’d go further to say there’s no such thing as authentic human experience under late-stage capitalism. Art is made to be sold; paintings are bought by the elites for tax purposes. Music is made to be sold to fat cat record labels and force fed through radio stations and tik toks. People go travelling to post the photos on instagram. People go to restaurants, cocktail bars, on hikes, to festivals to show-and-tell us that they were there, somewhere pretty or expensive. Influencers with more money than 80% of us get to do these things for free. People buy books they’ll never read just to post about it on book-tok. When I was a kid I was ribbed by my peers for reading books. Now it’s an indicator of how unique and interesting you are. Like wearing glasses. 

Frederic Jameson reckons that under late-stage capitalism, everything, including the immaterial, becomes commodified. Young girls desperate to have a baby so they can buy outfits for it, take pictures of it and gather tens of comments from friends and family showering her with virtual praise and affection. No one will admit to this obviously, but it’s a motivator. Relationships are commodified; if you really loved each other you’d get a mortgage and buy a house. You’d spend thousands of pounds on wedding rings, a wedding, a honeymoon, and every year after that an anniversary. Valentine’s Days, birthdays, Christmases. You’d pop out (ideally) more than one child to replace yourselves in the workforce once you retire and become a useless drain on governmental resources.

Speaking of the government, the right wing push the agenda of ‘family values’ and women having to have children because conservatism is intrinsically linked to capitalism (Also, not to be ignored is the right wing agenda of keeping control of women’s bodies but that’s a different essay). And if we stop having children, who will do all the jobs? All the blue collar jobs the elites would never dream of doing. It’s nothing to do with Christianity, or human biology hardwiring. We’re worker ants. Until robots are clever enough to replace us, they need, nay, rely on us all dreaming of achieving the cookie-cutter nuclear family that we were force-fed in movies and tv shows growing up. We need to keep rawdogging to keep the cogs of the economy turning, basically. 

I’m also going to nip this argument in the bud early, because I know someone (most likely a man) will be thinking it. ‘Aela, you do realise human beings ARE hardwired to reproduce, that’s what we’re put on this planet to do’. Yes. It is an instinct in us to mate. Whether or not it’s what we were ‘put’ here for we will not get into, for fear of heading down an existential rabbit hole with no conclusion. We were also hardwired to hunt and/or gather but you don’t see men dragging animal carcasses back to their wives and children sat in front of a fire in a cave anymore. Point being the world around us has entirely changed. We have McDonald’s and big Tesco now, so we don’t need to hunt and kill prey. We have Ubers and Ford Fiestas, so we don’t need to walk everywhere. We have condoms and overpopulation, so maybe we slow down on the reproduction. The geological clock is counting down, my friends. I will lose some of you with this next sentence. I am an antinatalist, so I am biased, but I truly believe bringing a child into the world, in the current state it’s in culturally, politically and geologically, is one of the cruelest things a person can do. Biological ‘necessity’ or not. 

As I read all this back I realise I sound like an incel in a fedora droning on to anyone who will listen about the plights of how terrible ‘these days’ are because I can’t get laid or make a steady income as an artist and social media makes me feel bad. This is not my intention. I do not look back on the past with rose-tinted glasses. As a feminist and as someone on the fence about her sexuality, I’m forever grateful to be alive at this time over any other. Too far back and I would have my rights stripped away from me, too far in the future and I fear I’d run the risk of becoming the touch starved, not-so-proud owner of an androgynous Tesla sex robot, Google Glass glued to my head and a right palm with an Apple Pay chip in it. Yes. This is the best time, the most optimal time to be alive. But maybe the victorians said that as they pulled another loose tooth out of their mouths, while having the contents of a chamber pot tipped over their heads from a window above. Point being humans probably always think the time of their aliveness is the best. It’s in the same vein as first-class-consciousness. It’s all we know, so it must be the best. 

I’ve ranted myself far away from the original intentions of this essay. The TLDR would be this: capitalism bad. But I guess the thing I would like the reader to take away from it is that all my life I’ve felt like a freak for not wanting the things I was told I should want. A husband, a car, a house, children, a good job. But the day I realised all of these things are just the cogs in the machine that keeps capitalism progressing, is the day I was free. You dont want any of those things because you inherently SHOULD. You want them because the rich and powerful have convinced you you want them for their benefit. Through all forms of media, advertising, scare-mongering news, religion, political parties. Love songs on the radio, Disney movies, family sitcoms, romance novels, baby dolls for little girls. 

And if you want/have any or all of the things I listed above, that’s fine. But I’m here to affirm to anyone who doesn’t, or feels, like me, like there’s something wrong with them, that it’s also fine to not want them. 

I’ll leave you with a quote that never fails to bring me comfort as I watch everyone I know fall in love and get houses and babies and mortgages:

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. “- Jiddu Krishnamurti