The Deliberately Single Man - Part III

Love Through a New Lens

This is the third in a series that highlights my framework for well-rounded single manhood that I’ve called “The Deliberately Single Man.” Originally published at Medium on February 21, 2022.

Looking at Love Through a New Lens

The deliberately single man recognizes quickly that he has to take a deep look at the concept of love. This is because, for reasons I will discuss later, society has relentlessly instilled in each of us a few, very narrow definitions of love. The single man will find his path blocked at almost every turn if he can’t begin to get a handle on what this cultural conditioning has done to him and everyone around him.

Let’s start with these few, narrow definitions. Looking across the culture, there are two types of love relationships that get the vast majority of airtime and occupy pride of place: love between romantic partners, especially when married; and love between parents and children. In the cultural imagination, this places the nuclear family as the primary vehicle for giving and receiving love.

Much of the remaining small portion of airtime is dedicated to love in other human relationships, such as for extended family or friends. Representations of any other form of love, for instance for a hobby, place, work, creative process, other life forms, or an idea, is virtually non-existent in the cultural marketplace.

How do we know this to be true? There are many simple mental exercises that show us. Tell someone “I’m falling in love” or “I’m in love,” and it’s taken to mean in a romantic sense with another person. Consider how often politicians reference “families,” and compare that with the fact that only 25% of households in the US are composed of mom, dad, and the kids. In the aftermath of a disaster, consider how many stories are written by, or about, people with spouses and children, and you’ll quickly see the proportion is higher than the 25% they actually represent.

Conversely, look at how the culture often derides and caricatures other forms of love. The man who spends too much time on a hobby “won’t grow up.” A single woman doesn’t love cats, she’s a “cat lady.” And let’s not forget the biggest caricature of all: the “career gal” who “can’t settle down,” but who, about 45 minutes into the movie, finally realizes that her work will never love her back.

What we have are two forces pushing for the same goal: the belief in romantic attachment grounded in the nuclear family as the source of the vast majority of love. The first force pushes for this goal by constantly talking about and celebrating these things. The second force does so by pathologizing any other form of love that is perceived to be an impediment to these things.

How does the deliberately single man begin moving past this? He must understand how we got to this point, and then use that understanding to begin the task of radically altering his definition of love.

So how did we get here? Largely due to the fact that in modern times, love has been used by political and economic forces as a form of social control. All societies have mechanisms in place to shape the behaviors of their members. Many societies around the world use the blunt force of government repression and attacks on civil rights to carry this out. But what of societies that have relatively high levels of political and social freedom? As Laura Kipnis writes in her book “Against Love,” these societies have to turn their members into self-policing subjects to attain their goals.

And what phenomenon has been hijacked to turn us freedom-loving moderns into self-policing subjects? Love. This did not just happen on its own. After all, love itself is personal and harmless, but many forces have and continue to work relentlessly to weaponize it.

One need look no further than Economics 101 to see how this has been accomplished. The public needs only to be convinced of two things to cause a run on a product. First, the consumer is unable to live without the product. Second, there isn’t enough of the product for everyone (read: toilet paper during the coronavirus pandemic.)

And so it has happened with the romantic, familial definitions of love that are most celebrated. We’ve been thoroughly convinced that we can’t live without it. And forces are continually at work inflaming our anxieties that there isn’t enough to go around. A byproduct of this anxiety is constant worry that we will not personally qualify for the limited quantities that exist.

One easy cultural reference that shows us the belief that we can’t live without romantic love is the assumption that all single people are looking for it, constantly. The single-by-choice movement has undoubtedly begun to loosen the iron grip of this assumption, but it still looms large, as seen in the near impossibility of finding a TV show where a single character has declared themselves deliberately so, and not due to any underlying pathology.

And despite the vanishing number of American adults that are choosing to have children, you can’t swing a cat in the zeitgeist without hitting no-love-compares-to-the-love-of-a-parent-for-a-child ideology. The implications for those without children, then, is that any love they experience can never measure up, and they are therefore stuck living a life that lacks the kind of love that makes us fully human.

Once the belief in the indispensability of these forms of love has permeated a society, a fear of lack or scarcity is easy to engineer. And looking at the cultural marketplace, the language of scarcity that exists around romantic relationships is abundant.

What TV series featuring adolescents doesn’t include an episode where someone waits too long to ask a date to the school dance, only to find a few undesirable or no choices left. Think pieces fill the internet with commentators parsing demographic data, wringing their hands about the proportion of the population that is “marriageable.” “All the good ones are taken,” we continually hear.

And one overwhelming type of scarcity haunts us in our quest for these most valued of love relationships: time scarcity. We fear, almost universally, almost constantly, that “time is running out.” This is the fear that tells us, unless we act swiftly and decisively to secure some of this scarce love, we run the risk of reaching a point where the doors close permanently, and we are left with no options.

Given these difficult circumstances, what does the culture suggest we do to make sure that we are among the lucky who are able to enjoy this scarce resource? Follow one overarching, powerful edict: BE NORMAL.

By the age of 12, most of us start our crash course in the vital importance of being normal as a prerequisite to these most valued love relationships. Kids quickly learn that everything from the quality of their clothes, their appearance, or falling within that catch-all term of “weird” will greatly limit their options. Added to these lessons by the teens and 20s is the near paralyzing fear of “saying the wrong thing,” and therefore appearing abnormal, to a prospective partner.

In fact, the need to be in the “Goldilocks zone” is so pressing that it permeates the entire experience of the partner search. You can’t be too disinterested or too needy. You can’t talk too much or too little. You have to invest in your appearance, but can’t appear to be overly concerned about your looks. You have to be confident but, you know, in the “right” way, and on, and on.

If the search stage has been successful and a relationship declared, particularly through living together or a marriage, your continued compliance with normality is enforced through what Kipnis in “Against Love” describes as a 24-hour surveillance state. Comings and goings are closely tracked. Tallies of time doing all forms of activity, as well as real and perceived slights, are mentally recorded, and this neatly-kept ledger of surpluses and debts is ready to be used at any time to bolster the case for the ledger holder’s “rationality” or “normality.”

Indeed, even the most trivial matter can be litigated endlessly in an effort to determine which party is the more rational or normal. This surveillance-state, constant-litigation dynamic is the fodder for countless TV sitcom jokes about relationships and marriage being some form of prison. The popularity of certain types of humor comes down to two factors: the proportion of the population that identifies with the joke, and the degree to which it’s difficult to talk about the topic in other settings. In other words, these jokes have found so much traction across so many shows over so many years because many viewers easily identify with the feeling of “doing time” in a relationship.

If there is even a grain of truth to the “partnership-as-prison” trope, how is it that so many people have been convinced to put themselves in prison by making choices to pursue these types of relationships, sometimes multiple times over the lifespan? We need look no further than the above-mentioned TV sitcoms to get an idea why.

At the conclusion of each episode of many of these shows, there is a lesson to be learned, a “moral of the story.” And very frequently, the lesson, when it comes to romantic relationships, family, and kids, is “it’s all worth it.” No matter how much figurative blood and treasure is sacrificed in determining who does more around the house, or how much emotional bandwidth is used to conduct the 200^th argument over the same issue, this is love, we’re told. This is family. This is the way it works. In their time of doubt, our TV protagonists are reassured: “You have everything.”

This entire arc – of normality as the price of admission, of surveillance and litigation as the enforcer of normality once admitted, and the constant reinforcement of the message that this arrangement is as good as it gets – is how political and economic forces have weaponized love as a form of social control.