Some years back, I browsed through my mother's high school yearbook and was surprised how old the graduating class of 1947 looked. The beehive hairdos and pompadours made the students look like adults in miniature. The role they’d been rehearsing for years, independence, was within their grasp.
My mother and father were married for over half a century. They and their friends lasted as couples to the very end, seemingly happily (with the exception of one couple).
When things got tough, my parents didn't bail out. But then again, they met at a time long before the online upgrade, the instant rebate and the "no questions asked" return policy. The first-quarter business cycle didn’t dominate the culture like it does now. Time’s dominion was closer to the phases of the moon than the cycles of the motherboard.
Today over half of all marriages end in divorce within 10 years.
Not that any of this was ever easy. For generations, the monagamy theme park has tested both the brave and the foolhardy. You and your flame are floating toward the Tunnel of Love and suddenly you're disoriented and in the dark. Next thing you know you're pulling G’s on the Counselling Tilt-o-Whirl, or losing it on the In-law Scream Machine. But fate willing, there will be enough good times to make the ride worthwhile.
Unless you’re shlepping along alone on the fairground. A number of years back on Valentine’s Day, local media spun singlehood as celebratory, with one newsweekly running a lead article on the slippery joys of self-love. Another local entertainment weekly provided some epicurean advice for the solitary, offering restaurant choices for a romantic dinner alone.
You know the times they are a-changin' when the expression “go screw yourself” has shifted from insult to advertorial.
Many of us have friends who have given up the search for love completely. Their banner is a calendar full of free weekends and their throne a pre-warmed seat in a coffee shop.
In today's fast-paced urban environment, singlehood has become Shakespearean. Romeo sits in a Starbucks sipping coffee while Juliet jogs past the window in her bluetooth headphones. Romeo catches a glimpse of her and returns to his smart phone. Juliet catches a bus and heads home to dress up for a romantic dinner by herself. The two will never meet up in this fractured fable, because he's on Bumble and she's on Hinge. (Besides, Romeo never really got a good look at her: she jogged past wearing a face mask.)
It’s not like we live in sexually repressed times - not when the latest research findings about female ejaculation, or a newly discovered erogenous zone, are trumpeted in the press like the unearthing of a Mayan temple. It’s not sex our culture is uncomfortable with. It’s intimacy.
Bowling Alone
Back in 2000, Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam examined social statistics from the past century in the US and found a surprising decline in the number of civic organizations, guilds, sports leagues, neighbourhood clubs and volunteer groups. Americans, among the most gregarious people on earth, have retreated in huge numbers from service to the community to tending the self. This trend has been accompanied by several decades worth of ego-massaging messages from conservative foundations, public relations firms and advertising companies, with the self-esteem industry and personal growth movement joining the chorus.
The economic factor is paramount. We’re working longer and harder for less, often taking jobs hundreds of miles away from family. We find we have less time and energy to cultivate new connections with others, and when we do, they are usually mediated electronically, just like our work lives. In this abstract cultural climate, romantic love becomes more of a commodity, skeletonized into the recipes of self-help books, sentimentalized in Netflix schlock and counterfeited by the quick fix of porn.
In a survey cited some years back in the New York Times, Americans rated Boston and New York as the loneliest cities in the US to live in. In another poll, New Yorkers put “having lots of friends” near the bottom of the list of desired personal traits. “Taking responsibility for your actions” was number one. For denizens of the Big Apple, pride in stand-alone autonomy far outweighed connection with non-family members -- in other words, community.
Urbanites rush around in all directions, meeting schedules, making brief contact and parting ways. That's less tragedy than trajectory, but it's harder to create lasting chemical bonds in this hot, high-pressure environment.
For people living in subsistence societies, relaxed face-to-face contact is not a luxury but a necessity. But mutuality and reciprocity, the glue for both friendship and the barter system, aren’t essential to a digital economy. Long-term connections increasingly seem a relic from an age of small towns and staying put. And of course, I hardly need to add that the situation has grown that much worse over the past two years, with a culture of masking and social distancing making spontaneous connections even more difficult.
Therapist, sex partner, mother, father and friend
No one can deny that in relative terms we're blessed with an abundance of opportunities in the western world. With our baseline needs met, we have the opportunity to obsess all we want about any love we feel we're missing out on. When in a relationship, it's common to expect the partner to be therapist, sexual partner, mother/father and friend. No culture other than our own would be mad enough to expect one person to fulfill all of these roles. But such an attitude is almost a given in a time of diminished community.
The media and public relations industry fills the gap created by atomization with messages tailored to get under our skin and work into our psyches like spirochetes. Advertising, television, film and the mainstreaming of pornography present us with impossible standards for beauty, style and wealth, which younger people unconsciously use as templates for potential partners.
Market behavioural psychology relies, and has always relied, on dissatisfaction -- with one’s body, hair, features, education and personality - all to better move products and services. The surface becomes the real, the form the essence. An alienated self, manipulated by the market into subliminal self-loathing, is in a tricky position when it comes to love.
A culture that thrives on weapons of mass delusion, whether they're the seductive lies of cosmetic alteration, brand identity or health security, is heading for sci-fi hybridization: two parts Brave New World, one part 1984. With our hypervigilant, pharmaceutically tweaked, megahertz mentalities, what peculiar forms will love take in the future?
You may remember Samantha, the self-aware AI personal assistant from the film Her. Preliminary gropings toward a real-world Samantha are offered by a companion chatbot app called Replika:
Among its popular traits, Replika is deeply customizable. The gender, looks, and name of the chatbot character are up to the user. Users can even determine the type of relationship they have with this virtual character. Options include friendship, mentorship, romantic relationship, or “see how it goes.” As mentioned in the introduction, it is estimated that around 40 percent of the 500,000 regular monthly users choose the romantic option.
On the horizon, past the ersatz romanticism of chatbots apps, there’s the seductive spectre of “teledildonics” and sex robots. Max Frisch’s definition of technology,“the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it,” has been upgraded. It’s now “the knack of so arranging people so we don’t have to experience them.”
Person and Persona
There never ever a golden age for love, of course. Untold millions of couples in the past suffered years of mutual loathing, chained in unholy acrimony out of social or religious pressure. Few mourn the passing of the postwar era, with its repression and narrow worldview (and that’s one reason why I’m disinclined to romanticize the so-called “greatest generation” my parents hailed from). That said, there is such a thing as trade-offs. For all the advances in sexual and personal freedom of the past 40 years, we’ve given away a few precious things in the bargain, not the least of which is our time.
Free time and spontaneity are like sunlight to romantic connection. Family and community are its soil. It's subterranean spring, its aquifer, is authenticity. It’s toxins include pharmaceutical mood management, surveillance capitalism, and a farcical forever war on a microbe and its variants that can never be won.
The word "person" is drawn from persona, an ancient Greek word for mask, in the theatrical sense. The root meaning of the word betrays the illusory, playful nature of our surface personalities. In Greek tragedies and comedies, the masks had carved openings through which actors spoke. Who, or what, speaks through us? Do we recite lines provided by the brokers of disconnection, or do we speak from the heart?
True love connects us to "the real thing." Not a syrupy beverage, but the ultimate Act or Actor behind all masks.
More in Part 2.
You are a wonderful writer. I often find myself smiling at your yummy prose, enjoying your choice of topics, words and cadence. And sometimes I catch myself thinking ‘But you don’t agree with what he just said’ and somehow it doesn’t matter or diminish my enjoyment. That is a great talent Geoff! Always look forward to your POV.
Brave is he who tackles this topic in the modern world! This is another terrific post and the word that really caught my attention is 'authenticity'. Without that crucial ingredient we have neither love nor freedom...and sometimes it seems to me that our entire culture has become high-inauthentic. Looking forward to Part 2.