Silent Partner

“The practice of love takes time,” bell hooks writes in All About Love, warning that many of us may “never know fulfilling love,” and instead be willing “to settle for strategies that help ease the pain and increase the peace, pleasure and playfulness in existing relationships.”

“I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.

Operating in the anxious space between notions of health and toxicity, relationship apps teach us ways of loving that privilege efficiency over depth, quantifiability over knowledge, and success over joy.

The preoccupation with what it means to assign love value is not a new phenomenon, nor is the conflation of the language of love with the language of business. What is new is the idea that tracking love and love’s expression is important “internally” to the couple over the course of a relationship.

Cut off from wider networks of care, relationship work begins to look like the solution for all the alienation we may feel under capitalism.

the new desire for intimacy “has its roots in alienation caused by social fragmentation under capitalism”: The erosion of wider networks of support has meant that people increasingly seek a stable source of care, emotional fulfillment and validation in their partner.