"Materialists" syllabus: what to read if you want to know more about love and the marketplace
Don't succumb to sociocultural amnesia!
At the risk of being late to the discourse™️, I’m here to talk about the movie Materialists. Sort of.
(Mild spoilers ahead.)
I didn’t dislike my experience of watching Materialists, but mostly because I enjoyed its aesthetics, i.e. Dakota Johnson’s face and wardrobe. The story had a lot of potential, especially the leg-lengthening surgery subplot, but it fell flat for a lot of reasons. The class tensions and politics were unconvincing at best (in no way can Chris Evans persuade me he’s a broke cater waiter, although I’ll give the movie this: his apartment for once gives us a real representation of a shitty New York kitchen and bathroom); the dialogue was tedious and repetitive; the characters underdeveloped and miscast. The assault subplot was downright bizarre and tonally off.
I saw it while in the midst of finishing up the first part of my book, which is, if you’re new here, U Up? A Social History of Online Dating (forgive me for the overt plug, but it’s necessary to establish my bona fides on the topic). A research trip, if you will.
For book-writing reasons, my ears perked up when Dakota Johnson first said that marriage was a business deal. But then the movie repeated this 500 times, and as the plot progressed, the script didn’t say anything nuanced or new on the subject. And then I started reading some of the discourse™️ about the film, which is packed with observations about how love these days is so commodified, or that it has become hard labor. This has made me want to engage in the obnoxious act of sending people links to various books and saying a whole lot of “Actually…” Instead, I’m writing this.
I’m being a bit of a know-it-all jerk here, because not everyone is reading tomes on the history of courtship for work purposes. But this sentiment of bemoaning transactionality in modern relationships strikes me as another strain of the ubiquitous nowadays nostalgia for something that was never really there.
Marriage was an overtly business or political transaction for millennia, and the idea that it must be based on romantic love is relatively new (roughly the second part of the 18th century). Crucially, the search for love has long been embedded within our capitalist economic system. It not only takes place within it, it uses its metaphors and it reflects its dynamics — and these go far beyond simply judging men for their net worth or height and women for their looks. Historians, sociologists, and novelists have been saying this for decades (centuries even — we’re often blinded by Jane Austen’s Happily Ever After’s and pretty dresses and lavender fields, while her work centers on critiquing the notion of the marriage mart). Yes, with online dating, these market-based mechanisms are much more visible, and amplified. But they’ve always been around, very much including in the era of meet-cutes that we love to idealize.
Rant over, but only to recommend a number of books that go deeply into these topics and are absolutely fascinating reads that have shaped my thinking.
1. Marriage, A History. How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz. This is the kind of book that makes me yell “why don’t we teach history at schools like THIS?!” (i.e. how regular people lived and interpreted their lives, and how those threads connect to today). Coontz’s work challenges a ton of cultural assumptions, showing us how love-based marriage is a deeply experimental project if we look at it from a historical perspective. It will make you a book annotator if you’re not one already. Here’s one of my underlinings: “Some Greek and Roman philosophers even said that a man who loved his wife with ‘excessive’ ardor was ‘an adulterer.’ Many centuries later Catholic and Protestant theologians argued that husbands and wives who loved each other too much were committing the sin of idolatry.” (!!)
2. From Front Port to Back Seat. Courtship in Twentieth Century America, by Beth Bailey. This book absolutely blew my mind when I read it, and I promise it will blow your mind, too. It’s the bible of courtship studies for good reason. Bailey illustrates how the early- and mid- 20th century dating systems directly reflected the economic and political situation at the time, and the market at large. It was all about consumption, competition, scarcity, and abundance. The competitive pressure of “rating and dating” of the increasingly consumerist 1920s — where your social status was determined by the number of dates you had — was so intense that women in one college made a pact not to date on certain nights so they could have time to study. The era of “going steady” in the 1950s, when 12-year-olds were getting into long-term relationships and wearing “meticulously padded strapless formals” to dances to appear as little dateable adults? A pretty direct influence of the chaos and various of shortages of World War Two.
3. Labor of Love. The Invention of Dating. by Moira Weigel. This was one of the first books I reached for when I started researching my book idea, and it’s one that I keep coming back to. Weigel builds on Bailey and Coontz’s ideas in a deeply convincing and breezy history of how looking for love has been labor ever since “dating” was invented at the turn of the last century, when working class men and women started intermingling in cities.
These three are absolute must-reads. If you want to go deeper into the history of the business of marriage more specifically, the historian Marcia Zug is the person to go to. In Buying a Bride. An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches, she talks for instance about how supplying brides to colonists in the US and Canada was a key economic and nation-building project — often a deeply questionable one (fun fact: when a ship with young British brides arrived in Canada in 1862, some miners would propose to the women just by holding up gold nuggets as the women walked by). On my TBR I also have Zug’s You’ll Do. A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love.
If you want a deeply sociological take, go to Eva Illouz, who has written multiple books around this topic and is one of the pre-eminent thinkers on love and capitalism (her language is more academic and philosophical, just be warned.) I’m currently in the middle of Consuming a Utopia. Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism which discusses just how much media and consumer capitalism has influenced our perceptions and expectations of romantic love (a topic that comes up again and again in my interviews about online dating). Arlie Hochschild is another giant in this area.
Eventually, I hope to add my book to this list. 💁♀️
P.S. I might drop an occasional post here that stems from my book research. Let me know if this is something that’s interesting to you!
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I’d add Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari to the list too. You might take an interest in it too because the book has a well designed interior. A lot of effort was put into that and I think it helped.