I’ve had a hell of a time with online dating. I haven’t had much fun, and I haven’t found a mate. I hadn’t been able to understand fully why it “wasn’t working” until I read Eva Illouz’s book The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations. Illouz has studied the relationship between love and capitalism for twenty years, and in this book she describes the ways that consumer culture has shaped social bonds. She focuses specifically on what she terms “scopic capitalism”—how the modern free market creates economic value primarily through images. On practically every page I underlined some insight that matched my own experience; my personal travails began to make more sense.
Choice—sexual, consumer, or emotional—is the chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal polities are organized.
In the fall of 2016, my second marriage ended in spectacular concert with the presidential election. My second husband was running for office, and we couldn’t tell people we were splitting up until after the election because it might have disrupted his campaign. He lost anyway. The night of the election, I was at home alone with our dogs, mourning the end of my marriage but thinking At least at the end of this horrible night we’ll have a woman president. In April of 2017, I started dating. I was thirty-seven. I had moved from Texas to Los Angeles, where I knew almost no one, so online dating seemed like a promising approach, especially in a metropolis of ten million people. The pool of prospects would be both deep and wide.
Consumer culture—arguably the fulcrum of modern identity—is based almost axiomatically on the incessant practice of comparison and choice.
I have been on first dates with 107 people in the past five years, without securing a long-term love relationship with anyone, which was always my goal. It wasn’t my goal to go on dates with a lot of people, or to carry out some anthropological or sociological study. Yes, I’ve had some interesting experiences that make good stories: the first date where the horse ran away with me and I thought I would die. The first date where the guy drank himself unconscious at the bar, after going on and on about “authentic enlightenment.
”The first date where the guy started crying and said he felt like he knew me. The first date where the guy took a nap. The first date in a botanical garden in Pasadena, where the guy told me he could hear the plants in the garden screaming. He’d just come back from Peru, where he’d done a lot of ayahuasca. The first date I flew to Tucson for, which ended in my crossing the border into the US from Mexico on foot, three days later
and taking a Greyhound from Calexico back to Los Angeles. The many first dates where the guy failed to ask me a single question, while I kept the “conversation” aloft by asking him about himself. The part where I moved to Israel during a global pandemic, thinking I’d convert to Judaism and have an IVF baby at the age of forty-one, both of my children already grown. People laugh when I say,
“The first one is the only one whose name I don’t know,” or when I talk about how I’ve been on dates with so many people in Los Angeles that I see them everywhere now—I even saw one guy I’d dated at a funeral. But it was never my goal to write about online dating, or accumulate interesting experiences; all along, I’ve told myself to think of it as a terrible means to an end.
The end has never come. So I mostly thought about my
