Labor of Love (33 page)

Miss Lonelyhearts is so accustomed to these conversations that he hardly notices. In case we doubt that this is a numbing strategy these sad men use to protect themselves against their sense of impotence, Nathanael West tells us: “They would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk.”

The practice of holding up this kind of hateful language as proof of immunity to feeling has not gone away. Every decade may get the
American Psycho
that no decade deserves. Since the beginning of the Great Recession, the bestselling author, public speaker, and professional misogynist Tucker Max has earned millions of readers by dishing out stories of his frat-boyish sexual escapades. Every day his website offers tweetable swipes that he has taken at women he has slept with. When I visit his website, this is the most recent:

“I know this really sexy move you can do with your mouth. It's called ‘shutting the fuck up.'”

*   *   *

The rudeness of these men is part of the revenge fantasy that they offer. It plays a key role in their refusal to perform the emotional labor that the women in their lives expect.

Men more polite than Miss Lonelyhearts and Tucker Max also reject women who do not manage to “seem easy.” How many times have you heard a man explain why he left a woman by saying that, in some way, she demanded too much emotional labor of him? How many female exes became unbearable because they were “too much work,” “not worth the effort,” “difficult,” “oversensitive,” “intense,” or “tiresome”? Still more criticisms imply that women fail to manage their own emotions properly; they are “hysterical,” “illogical,” “shrill,” “unreasonable,” “overwhelmed,” “all over the place,” “confused.” At some point every woman seems to become “crazy.”

Ease may still be the desire of every man.

For almost a century, dating self-help books have warned women that they must repress their emotions in order to avoid making their partners think that they expect something. This clearly places a burden on women who want to be involved with men. It is not good for men either. For one thing, it frankly infantilizes them.

In 1928, Doris Langley Moore wrote that a man could not be trusted to control his impulses or anticipate his own feelings. “Men, like children, soon tire of what is soon obtained.”

The Rules
give the same warning. “He might think he wants to see you every night,” the authors say. “He doesn't.” The Rules Girl must not only sustain her man's desire by making herself scarce. She also must understand it better than he does himself.

This philosophy of love assumes that men are as emotionally helpless as boys are practically helpless. As a child needs his mother to cook and clean and care for him, so, too, does an adult man need a woman to manage his feelings. Otherwise, like the bachelor who lives in filth and lets laundry pile up and orders Chinese takeout every night, he will be a complete mess.

This gendered division of labor makes women emotionally overworked and makes men emotionally incompetent. At the same time, it burdens men with the sole responsibility for making decisions about their sexual and romantic liaisons. As the kind of woman Parker captured in “A Telephone Call” frets in maddened silence, we can easily imagine a man growing overwhelmed with the pressure of the decision that has been left up to him. More often than not, the men in these stories start strong, waver, and then fade out.

*   *   *

This kind of mutual mystification is not good for men or for women. What it is good for, however, is a multibillion-dollar self-help industry that profits off of their loneliness and uncertainty.

Self-help books have an obvious incentive to mystify men to women, and vice versa. Elinor Glyn's
Philosophy of Love
was aimed at a general audience. But the bestselling advice franchises of recent decades all insist that men and women have radically different approaches to romance—and therefore require specific advice on how to approach one another.

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
, one of the bestselling advice books of all time declared.

“Men and women differ in all areas of their lives,” the author John Gray explains in his introduction. “They almost seem to be from different planets.” The book even includes a “Venusian/Martian Phrase Dictionary.”

Many dating experts since have followed this lead, presenting gender difference as the most helpful rubric for understanding relationships. (The bestselling books rarely acknowledge that anyone might be interested in anything other than heterosexual monogamy headed toward marriage.) There are obvious reasons why this formula helps sell books. It suggests that there is some secret to dating. And it turns the author into an authority, simply on the basis of being a man or woman.

In
Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
, Steve Harvey promises to tell readers
What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment
. Like John Gray, Harvey says that all dating difficulties boil down to gender difference. But compared with Gray, who strives to sound neutral and empathetic, Harvey seems inclined to side with Team Boys over Team Girls.

“Women are complicated creatures,” Harvey writes. “Now men, by contrast, are very simple creatures. It really doesn't take much to make us happy.”

For the view from neuroscience, you can read
The Male Brain
and
The Female Brain.
Even
Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man
sticks to the idea that desire works straightforwardly along gender lines. Cowritten by two friends who match the description in the title, and illustrated with cheeky line drawings, it suggests that male pleasure is a secret a gay man could simply let a woman in on.

“Think of this book as your personal trainer, at a fraction of the cost,” the introduction tells the reader.

The training that most self-help books offer is how to make yourself malleable. Self-help tells you to bow to the world as it is. The approach that says that the sources of all your frustrations are in you is supposed to feel empowering. It tells readers that they can do something. Yet when addressing problems that are clearly social in origin, what it trains you best in is self-blame. It scolds you, while it offers you a hand.

The reason that the advice in books like
Philosophy of Love
or
The Rules
or
Act Like a Lady
is so repetitive is not simply that their authors are dull. The reason that the genre seems incapable of imagining any kind of desire that falls outside a very narrow spectrum—looking for sex or looking for marriage—is not simply that the authors are prejudiced. Rather, this form of self-help precludes the possibility that a connection between two or more people might be capable of changing the conditions in which they live. The genre exists to help perpetuate those conditions. As a result, the love that self-help books hold out as the prize for following all their rules rarely sounds worth it when you get there. It seems average to the point of emptiness.

 

AFTERWORD:
LOVE

The premise of the romantic self-help industry is that the problems we encounter in dating are individual. The history of dating reveals that the opposite is true. We inherit the roles we play in the theater of dating from those who came before us and take stage directions from those who live around us. Every person may experience intimate feelings intimately. But this does not mean that those feelings are merely individual. Our intimate feelings reflect the power of forces that shape every other aspect of our lives. The possibilities of how we feel arise from those we feel among.

Self-help literature usually ignores the fact that the frustrations that cause people to seek self-help are often not just their problems. They are social in origin. They do not lie somewhere deep within us but reflect the many relationships that constitute our world. Some authors acknowledge that sources of the dissatisfaction their readers experience lie outside their control. Yet once they have, they almost immediately push this fact aside. They say,
Okay, but let's focus on what you can do.
Then they proceed to tell you how to adapt to get by as best you can with things the way they are.

This approach seems self-defeating when you consider that the goal is love—opening and merging your one life with the lives of others. Love requires openness. The point is to be changed by, and to witness change in, one another. Slowly, this back-and-forth transforms the shared reality we call the world. Love is less noun than verb: not a thing to get, but a process to set in motion. Yet many of the experts who take for granted that love is the highest goal of every life—the happy ending that will make all efforts worth it—seem to doubt the possibility of changing anything. Ironically, they place little faith in love itself.

I began to feel a need to write this book when I sensed that I was trying to make a life according to rules I did not understand and that the process had blinded me to my desires. Following my desires was supposed to be the point. Yet I had never reflected long enough to discover whether the feelings that I believed should be there actually were. I had no idea who I was. And as long as I kept impersonating all the women I thought I should be, I could not receive love, much less give it. I had no self to choose to give it from.

I did not know then what book I was writing. That became clear only as I read and talked with friends and strangers and began to notice that they, too, felt anxious and confounded by the roles that dating pushed them into. They were especially exasperated by how often these roles seemed to follow strictly gendered scripts that pitted them against their partners.

Through these conversations, I came to see that American culture sends deeply mixed messages about our courtship system. A huge number of products are devoted to depicting, discussing, and facilitating dating. An archaeologist unearthing our artifacts eons hence would have to conclude that it was a crucially important part of life in our civilization, if only from the number of dating apps on our disintegrating smartphones. Yet as a subject of inquiry, dating usually remains confined to venues marked as frivolous, like women's magazines or romantic comedies. In practice, we treat it as recreation—an individual pursuit rather than a collective concern. The result has been to put an enormous amount of pressure on people to date, while providing little support for them.

As I neared the end of my research, where the history of dating caught up with the present, I began to notice that our culture has a similarly split attitude toward love. On the one hand, we fixate on it. Americans gorge on romance novels, sentimental movies, and bride-themed reality shows; couples take on debt to stage industrial-size weddings, then slog through years of costly therapy trying to keep the promises they made at them. On the other hand, we accept social arrangements that leave many people little time to devote to personal relationships. Images and narratives about love that we consume constantly reinforce the message that only certain kinds of love can count.

Self-help books, movies, and pop songs alike tend to focus on love that is romantic, monogamous, usually heterosexual, and ideally headed toward marriage and reproduction. The writer and activist Laurie Penny has dubbed this “Love
TM
.” I think of it as
Love: The End
, the final frame that supersedes all the awkward or heartbreaking scenes that came before and blots them gently away. “Nobody remembers anything about dating, once they're out” a married friend laughs. “It's like we all have posttraumatic shock.” Many single people speak of love as if it were an escape route or a prize they hope to get for making it through dating's trials.

Some feminists claim that love is bad for us. In her book
Against Love
, the Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis argues that the ideal of a lifelong romantic relationship dupes its adherents into living lives in which they feel unfree and unfulfilled. “When did the rhetoric of the factory become the language of love?” Kipnis asks. “When it comes to love, trying is always trying too hard: work doesn't work.” Kipnis celebrates the spontaneity of flirting and erotic play as a source of joy and growth. She sees compulsory monogamy as a tool of social control that renders Americans desexed and docile.

Women in particular are often exhorted to work at Love
TM
in ways that feel coercive. Both material realities and sexist socialization tell women that living without it will be worse for them than it would be for a man. Single women earn less money than their male counterparts; if they have children, they usually bear most of the responsibility and expense of raising them. While our culture may be becoming more comfortable with the idea that women might opt out of long-term coupledom, the figure of a spinster continues to elicit pity. By contrast, the image of the lifelong bachelor still exudes dusty glamour.

The problem that Kipnis highlights is not with love per se. The problem is with a world where Love
TM
is the only love going, and where structural inequalities compel the individuals who buy into it to put in different amounts of work. We may need more words for all the forms love can take.

The Ancient Greeks had three:
eros
,
philos
, and
agape
. These meant desire, friendship, and the love of God for the world he created. The Romans translated
agape
as
caritas
, “charity.” Love can be given without expectation of return. We might start by being kinder and more generous toward ourselves. Women in particular must unlearn the ways that we are taught to devalue our own wishes and well-being—to see ourselves as too fat, too loud, too ambitious, too needy, and so on.

This book has shown how many of the things that trouble daters about their personal lives are more than personal. To improve them we would need to make the kinds of political changes that can be achieved only by banding together and organizing. Rather than directing the critical energies that we apply to self-help inward, if we directed them outward, we might come up with concrete fixes that could make dating—and much besides dating—better. If there were better health care, child care, and maternity leave policies, for instance, would dating on the biological clock be nearly as nerve-racking as it is now? If the demands of school and work were not so grueling, would young people feel so much pressure not to “waste time” on relationships? Perhaps—or perhaps not. They would almost certainly feel freer to explore.