Love is a commercial tool

The argument

The experience of romantic love is continually co-opted by capitalist forces, with an encroaching sense of commercialisation infecting almost every part of the 'experience' of love. The claim is not that people spend money on those they love, but that the spending has become the form the feeling is required to take. The evidence offered is the conversion of love's occasions into markets. The milestones of a romantic relationship are expected to be celebrated monetarily, with fancy dinners and gifts. Valentines Day, a day originally named to commemorate a Christian martyr, is now a day worth over $20 billion to the U.S. economy. Weddings, previously religious ceremonies, are now a $161 billion dollar industry in the U.S., with increasingly extravagant ceremonies considered rites of passage. In each case what the argument rests on is the change of character rather than the size of the figure: occasions that once took their meaning from religion now take it from expenditure, and the expectation reaches everyone, since a rite of passage is not optional. From there the argument turns to what this does to the emotion itself. The capitalist market is becoming increasingly intertwined with the emotion of love. People 'in love' are supposed to purchase certain things to prove that they are actually in love, which turns a private feeling into a public demonstration — focussing more on proving emotions to the outside world than to each other. Once the proof is a purchase, the measure of the feeling becomes its price. The lines between commercialisation and authentic feeling are therefore increasingly blurred, with amounts of money spent equated to depth of feeling. On this argument the 'sanctity' of love has been irreversibly impaired, and it is now nothing but capitalism-infected falsities.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The figures establish that an industry has attached itself to love, which is not the same as love being a commercial tool. A twenty-billion-dollar Valentine's market and a wedding industry of that size exist because the emotion is already there and is valued enough to sell to — the commerce is parasitic on love rather than constitutive of it. On the argument's own evidence, what has been commercialised is the public expression of love, and expression is downstream of the thing expressed. The historical contrast is also softer than the argument needs. Weddings are described as 'previously religious ceremonies' now turned commercial, but marriage has carried economic weight across cultures and centuries: dowries, bride price, betrothal gifts, and feasts whose lavishness signalled family standing. There is no pre-commercial era of romantic ritual to have fallen from. The scope is narrow too. The commercialisation described applies to a subset of romantic milestones in wealthy consumer economies. It says nothing about parental love, familial love or friendship, and little about the daily texture of most romantic relationships, which involves no purchases at all. The closing claim — that love's sanctity is 'irreversibly impaired' and it is 'nothing but capitalism-infected falsities' — is far stronger than anything the spending figures support, and stronger than the position needs, since a market that exploits an emotion presupposes an emotion worth exploiting.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Marriage and courtship carried economic weight long before modern consumer markets — dowries, bride price, betrothal gifts and status feasts — so there is no pre-commercial baseline from which the described decline could have occurred. [Rejecting P2] That people buy things to display love shows the market has attached itself to the emotion's expression, which presupposes rather than replaces the emotion; and it says nothing about parental, familial or everyday love.