Love & Labor: Romance as a Transaction Under Capitalism
People are hurriedly buying chocolate hearts and teddy bears for loved ones, picking out cheesy cards to smile at. Couples, and even friends, are posting affectionately on social media. It’s Valentine’s Day, a day of honeymoon romance, and love is in the air. While today is a day of romantic gift-giving, the societal expectation of providing for someone to prove you care for them goes beyond one day a year.
Love & Capitalism
Love languages give insight into how to give and receive our affection from others. Physical touch, acts of service, and gift-giving are a few common types of love languages. There is nothing wrong with having different love languages; however, there is a systemic norm of what “love” should look like: we must be able to provide our partner with something in return for their affection. What “providing” means in a relationship varies by individual, but in contemporary society, this tends to be material resources; the actions for providing these resources are rooted in upholding gender roles and choosing partners based on how they can “provide” for you.
Labor under capitalism determines an individual’s worth, and the individual internalizes what makes them “useful” under this system. If you’re deemed useless, you need to put in all of your energy to survive every day. The idea of love under capitalism operates in the same way. Love serves as a transaction: for someone to care about you, as the individual, you need to provide service to them, and vice versa. Healthy relationships, romantic and platonic, are meant to be rooted in empowerment and encouragement, which requires levels of action, both emotional and physical. However, the expectations of constant labor have permeated how love shows up in contemporary society; love has become a source of labor, now a transactional and weaponized source in society.
Buying Your Love
“It’s the thought that counts” is a phrase everyone hears at some point when they’re looking for a gift for a loved one. While this phrase is widely said and does hold in most, if not all, gift-giving situations, there is still a looming idea in many minds about whether the gift is monetarily good enough, with the thought attached to the gift. However, many people remain self-conscious when giving or receiving a “cheap” gift, even if it holds meaning. The idea behind this negative association with cheap gifts stems from the desire to supply loved ones with the best of the best, even if they don’t necessarily ask for an expensive gift. Using a framework during gift-giving occasions that is mutually accepted by all parties helps limit the anxiety around the monetary portion of a gift. In some relationships, there’s a spending maximum for gift-giving so as not to put pressure on loved ones to spend excessively. Using this as a ground rule allows for a mutual understanding of cost and lets people shop at ease.
When gift-giving, what is given can reveal some of one’s true nature. The giver has to have thought about what to get the receiver, even if it was deciding on a card. In the event that the giver decides against getting a gift, or forgets to get a gift, that also gives insight into how the giver views the receiver. Getting someone cleaning supplies or only kitchen-oriented gifts can show that the giver sees the receiver as more of a servant partner, but it could also show the giver knows the receiver, who might be enthusiastic about cleaning or cooking. A gift that may seem demeaning in one situation can also be meaningful in another.
Picture taken by Ambrose Moore in Burlington, Vermont.
To Love is To Perform
While buying expensive gifts tends to come from a mostly selfless place on the giver’s end, there is societal pressure that enforces this idea of needing to supply material resources to show your affection. This narrative is pushed on children in the media, and the everyday relationships they witness: the man of the household is the breadwinner of the house, and the woman of the household uses his income to fund the internal work of the household, like grocery shopping, while she does the cooking and cleaning. Today, that specific narrative isn’t as widely upheld upfront, but the fact that this societal norm of relationships is labor often goes overlooked. Having jobs, cooking, cleaning, and raising kids are all forms of labor that make up relationships, but these acts of labor are then used to demonstrate the traditional family relationship.
When “non-traditional” family units are introduced, they are seen as unnatural to society. Single parents, and even divorced parents who are on speaking terms, are faced with complications because they go against the societal labor makeup of a relationship. Single mothers raising children by themselves are often criticised for overburdening themselves through work and childcare, but single fathers are often praised for the same actions.
Today, both partners tend to be employed to financially support their household, but the idea of the man being the “provider” for a relationship is still ingrained in contemporary relationships. The man is expected to pay on dates and shower his partner with expensive gifts. This expectation can make a man feel obligated to provide financially for their partner, which can manifest in different ways. The two most notable are: entitlement and insecurity. Entitlement is shown when a man pays for something and expects something in return. Insecurity is shown when a man is hesitant to pay for something because he knows that it is the societal expectation for him to pay, but he may be unable to and doesn’t want to put himself in an awkward spot.
The roles in relationships are gendered to support the status quo: men are meant to provide, women are meant to rely. The gift-giver is often assigned to the man in a relationship, with the receiver as the woman. This enforcement of gender norms stems from the current system’s perception of gender as a series of behavioral acts, including forms of labor.
Liberation is for Lovers
Intertwining labor and love can not only create but also foster healthy relationships. However, the current idea of who performs what labor to show love is deeply flawed. We cannot move away from a system if we continue to uphold its evaluation of an individual’s value based on oppressive structures/systems meant to maintain the status quo. Love requires labor, but that labor shouldn’t be based on societal norms meant to maintain the current system. It is necessary that we unlearn these ideas of what a relationship is “meant” to look like, and instead, operate based on what the parties in the relationship want together, and as individuals, in order to foster healthy relationships unmarked by archaic and oppressive traditions.