The insistence that Love Always Comes Free – that Love™ cannot ever be related to money or value exchange – is remarkably convenient. Because it turns out that Love™ is also the theoretical basis for most of the work done for free, largely by women, so that the mechanisms of profit and production can be maintained. Most of the work of childcare, cooking, cleaning, personal care, helpmeeting and mopping up your husband’s ego after a hard day’s wage labour is not recognised as ‘real work’ because it is done out of ‘love’ – and if love workers ever questioned their conditions, their love would automatically be less worthwhile, less genuine, than the love of all those girlfriends, wives, mothers and daughters who do their duty with a silent smile and a bottle of Valium in the bottom drawer.
Love can also be work. Love is, in fact, difficult and challenging as well as rewarding, and even at its most exciting is deeply involved with money. I’m not trying to argue that childcare, housework and the work of supporting partners through waged labour should necessarily be paid, although if I did, I wouldn’t be the first to do so. It is important, however, to recognise that a lot of the work that women do remains unpaid or underpaid because we think of it as ‘love’, as a moral expression of feeling rather than a practical task of immense and tangible value. A lot of that ‘second shift’ of caretaking that is worth untold billions every year and is still performed largely by women, is exempted from consideration and left undiscussed precisely because it is understood as ‘love’, and ‘love’ always comes for free.9 A good job it does, because if it didn’t there’d be a hell of a bill to pay.