There’s another important way in which romantic love has become like work under neoliberalism: it is at once all-consuming and precarious. You are expected to pour the whole of your energy, all of your passion, time and enthusiasm into one endeavour, even though you know that it could end at any time if the magic disappears, or the economy tanks.
Our expectations of love and marriage have become ever loftier even as lifelong partnership ceases to be the norm: a recent study10 showed that where once one could at least acknowledge that a romantic life partnership was about expediency, sharing the bills and having someone on hand to put up shelves, now the things that we expect from marriage are more abstract and urgent: true kinship, decades of erotic fulfilment and a sense of spiritual completeness.
Even as our expectations of LoveTM become more frantic, the pressure is on for this ideal bond to replace the human kindness confiscated by the world of work. The purpose of dating, as far as the market is concerned, is to produce households. We are sectioned off into couples in order to make the production and reproduction of ‘human capital’ easier – self-reproducing family units isolated in their own struggle. Romantic love is both the consolation and respite from the privations of work and the means of making that work sustainable.
Women, in and out of romantic relationships, carry the burden of emotional labour. We do the work of healing and mending that we have always done.
Under late capitalism almost all of us are damaged goods, but it is women who end up trying to fix that damage, or at least keep the gears greased so the machine carries on functioning. I see so many bright, brilliant women pouring their energy into salving the hurt of men who cannot turn to each other for comfort. We do it as sisters, as mothers, as friends, and especially as lovers and wives, because of the sheer number of men and boys who are socialised out of intimacy with anyone they’re not fucking.
We pay with our time, with our emotional energy, with our attention and care, because that’s what women do, and that’s what love is: trying to carry another person’s pain and stress, even if they resent you for it, which they frequently do. As I said earlier, you can’t save the world one man at a time. That doesn’t stop many of us trying.
Thirty years ago, it was common for women to be expected to do the washing up after any gathering as a matter of course. Now we’re stuck cleaning up the emotional messes of modern life – and late capitalism has