Transcriber: Gabriella Chihan Stanley Reviewer: Denise RQ
On a warm and sunny day in 2011,
I stood in a crowd of a million people in central London
for the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
Conducting interviews with those around me,
I was struck by their great joy and optimism about the future;
not just the future of William and Kate, but their own future as well.
Several people talked about how the fact that Kate Middleton is a commoner,
meant that anyone can marry a prince.
(Laughter)
As one woman in the crowd told me:
"This girl is becoming a princess today, and that's part of the excitement.
"I wonder what she thought this morning when she got up and shaved her legs."
(Laughter)
"Oh, I'm becoming a princess!"
(Laughter)
She went on:
"Kate Middleton grew up normal, like us! Everyone dreams of marrying a prince.
We all dream about it."
Like this woman, I too, grew up on stories of true love and happily ever after.
[Someday my prince will come]
I would watch Disney's Cinderella and Snow White
as if they were instructions manuals
(Laughter)
- Yes! - (Laughter)
on how to go from being poor and downtrodden
to that white castle in the sky.
When I was young I was certain that I too would ride off into the sunset
with someone who would lead me into a better, more secure future.
(Sigh)
But I hate to tell you...
by the time of the Royal Wedding,
I no longer believed that love would save me.
When it comes to romance, my heart long ago turned to stone.
[Romance under a microscope]
But wait!
I got this way not from love gone wrong,
in fact, I have the best partner on earth.
I got this way because of what I do for a living: I'm a professor,
and I've been teaching a course on the sociology of heterosexuality
for two decades now.
I'm also writing a book about romance that is taking me everywhere
from the Royal Wedding to vampire tourism in Italy
(Laughter)
to interviewing over a hundred young people in North America
who were planning their own weddings.
And teaching and writing about romance for all these years
has taught me a few things.
The first thing I learned about romance is that is thoroughly modern.
It's not that there weren't earlier ideas of romance
like Guinevere and Lancelot, or Romeo and Juliet,
but if you think about it, these romantic stories did not occur in marriage.
It was about a knight and his Lady, but she was married to her Lord.
Or stories about going against your family's wishes, like Romeo and Juliet.
In any case, let's just say,
these pre-modern love stories generally, didn't end well.
(Laughter)
Our contemporary notion of romantic love,
that we will find our better future when we see our one true love
across a crowded room,
that we will feel butterflies in our stomach,
that when we kiss, fireworks will go off behind us,
and then we will get married, and live with that person happily ever after,
that's such a thoroughly modern idea you can't even find it before the 1800s.
I would actually date the start of modern romance
somewhere around 1850,
probably around the time when this woman, Esther Howland,
started making Valentine's Day cards in Worcester, Massachusetts.
[Mass produced emotions]
Although never married herself
(Laughter)
Ms. Howland's Valentine's Day cards represent the most important thing
we need to know about romantic love:
it was born alongside capitalism.
Capitalism commodified our authentic human emotions
into something we could buy.
Ever since Ms. Howland started her business,
capitalism and romance have been in bed together.
[Romance is the opiate of the masses]
The story of capitalism then, has always been a love story.
Capitalism sells us an ideology: romance,
that makes us ignore material reality in favor of fantasy.
Most people who've studied capitalism, haven't paid much attention to romance:
Karl Marx thought that capitalism happened because the modes of production changed,
Max Weber thought that capitalism happened because of protestantism
and this radical idea that God might actually want us to make a profit.
But the truth is capitalism wouldn't have had a chance,
had it not been for romance.
Capitalism and romance worked together like a well-oiled machine.
This machine, let's call it Love Inc.,
convinces us to work hard now for some future payoff,
but the payoff we learned to want is not necessarily more money
and more material goods,
but meeting our one true love and living happily ever after.
We just have to buy the right toothpaste, the right clothing,
the right engagement ring, the right wedding dress,
or even watch the right TED talk to make that future happen.
(Laughter)
[Birds don't fall in love]
The second thing I learned about modern romance is it's not natural.
(Laughter)
Cole Porter told us that birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it
(Laughter)
but I doubt it.
We have to learn to believe that romantic love is our path to happiness
just as we have to learn to believe in one god over another.
No one is born wanting a white wedding dress,
average cost about 1,300 dollars,
(Laughter)
a diamond ring about 5,600 dollars,
or gifts and cards for Valentine's Day.
Annual amount spent in the United States: 17.6 billion dollars.
We have to be taught to want these things.
We learn how to fall in love with each other
and from our culture, from movies, love songs, romance novels.
We even learned how to fall in love from our governments in the form of laws,
who gets to be married, who doesn't, what rights and privileges go along with that.
And of course, we learned to believe in romance
because we exist in an economy that depends on romance to sell us stuff.
[Romance provides a smokescreen]
This leads me to the third thing I've learned about romance.
It's difficult to take a look at the ideological work it's doing
because it hides behind this smoke screen of claiming that romantic love is natural,
that love is all we need, and anyone can fall in love.
Romance is propaganda like any other ideology,
little slogans that we say to each other like "love is blind"
that trick us into feeling optimistic about our futures
so we don't pay much attention to things like the distribution of wealth
or the environment.
(Laughter)
Love is not blind.
When we look at marriage in the US
we see that people almost never marry outside their class,
and rarely marry outside their race.
In the US today,
marriage has primarily become a sign of distinction, a status symbol,
like wearing a Rolex watch.
But it's also an optional one, that's primarily for college-educated people
who are also whiter and wealthier than the population.
A minority of adult Americans are married
and even fewer people are married in Europe.
Not only that, but white weddings are costing more now than ever.
[Love is not free]
The average cost of a wedding in the US has been rising
despite the ongoing economic recession and it's now 30,000 dollars.
You can double or even triple that in big cities like New York
where the average wedding is now 86,000 dollars.
To put that into perspective,
the median household income in the US is about 52,000 dollars,
and for a black family is about 38,000 dollars.
[The "traditional" family]
Even if you find your one true love, and you have that perfect wedding,
romantic love rarely leads to the happily ever after of the ideal family.
In the US, since the end of World War II there was this dream of getting married,
buying a house in the suburbs, having 2.3 kids and a white picket fence.
(Laughter)
The US government even subsidized this dream
with zero-interest housing loans for returning soldiers.
But this nuclear family was always
more of a shimmering mirage than a lived reality.
The nuclear family that some conservative commentators mistakenly referred to
as the "traditional" family,
was really a product of the nuclear age.
At that time, only about 40% of Americans lived in a family with 2 parents and kids;
today, fewer than 20% do.
By selling us an ideal that almost none of us will have,
romance managed to make us keep looking.
Keep looking for that happy ending: If only we'd found the right partner
or the right house, or the right picket fence.
[Love is not all we need]
Not only is love not blind, but it's hardly all we need.
In the US, 45.3 million people live in poverty, and about 1 in 5 children do.
We all need adequate food, shelter, and water.
We also need meaningful work and liveable wages,
we need to cut back a little climate change with all our energies,
we need racial and gender justice.
We need peace.
Even if we find our own happily ever after,
we still may not survive the future.
But because we come to believe romance is what gets us to a better future,
we spend an enormous amount of time and resources on coupling,
and very little on the challenges we actually face.
[The romance of Reaganomics]
This brings me to the fourth thing I've learned about romance:
it might actually destroy our future.
Even though romance makes us feel optimistic about tomorrow,
it's also taking us down this dead end of private lives
when what we need most are community and global solutions.
How did this happen?
How did we stop believing in a common future
and become obsessed with our own private happy endings?
I think it happened because a new form of capitalism,
often referred to as neoliberalism,
came along and privatized everything,
from education, to healthcare, to our futures.
In the US, this new form of capitalism began with this man, Ronald Reagan.
As Reaganomics took hold, so did romance.
Perhaps it's not a coincidence that seven months after Reagan took office
Charles, Prince of Wales, married Lady Diana Spencer
in the most fairytale of weddings.
750 million people watched it around the world.
One BBC commentator described the event as, "A fairytale fantasy.
It's like something out of Walt Disney."
[Disney Rediscovers Romance]
Speaking of Disney, the corporation wasn't doing very well in the 1980s
but it managed to turn itself around
by reinvigorating romance as its genre of choice.
After really poor sales with non-romantic films
like "Honey, I shrunk the kids," or "Oliver and Company,"
Disney went back to its romantic roots,
and in 1989 it hit the jackpot with "The little mermaid" and "Pretty Woman."
Both of these movies, which I'm sure you've seen,
convince us that love is blind
and even if we have to completely abandon our families and communities,
love will lead into a better future.
(Laughter)
These movies sent Disney profits up 35%,
and nearly 57% on the sale of videocassettes,
and if you don't know what those are, you'll have to look it up.
(Laughter)
[US Income Inequality]
After several decades of Reagan-style economic policies in the US,
the top 10% now accounted for 80% of the wealth.
And the top 1% accounted for 47% of income.
Recently, en economist who studies the global concentration of wealth
pointed out that this level of income inequality
is not only detrimental to economic growth,
but it can also "lead to a capture of the political process
by a tiny high income and high wealth elite."
This is an outcome that already seems to have happened in US politics.
And this redistribution of wealth happened
because romance seduces us into privatizing our futures.
Instead of imagining we're all in this together if we want a happy ending,
we imagine we can enter a better world by the virtue of falling in love.
It's not that there was a conspiracy of global capitalism and romance,
it's just that romance could do the emotional labor
for this new type of capitalism,
and so, we've clung to it the way a princess clings to her prince
when the evil witch is about to destroy the world.
[Keep Calm. Your Prince Will Come. Panic! There is no prince!]
Love is worth taking a closer look at
precisely because it is neither natural nor universal.
Romance teaches us not to deal with a reality but fantasies.
Money, divorce, decreasing happiness are not to be acknowledged.
Global climate change, a world-wide redistribution of wealth
in the hands of the few at the cost of many can be ignored
as we increasingly spend our time and energy searching for the perfect romance.
Romance promises everyone, rich or poor, black or white, straight or gay
that he can reap its rewards.
You can be old and have failed at romance over, and over, and over again,
but just keep trying; your prince or princess is out there.
(Laughter)
You can be poor and have no way out of poverty,
but still, imagine that one day you might marry a prince.
[The End?]
Haven in the form of a fairytale ending is just around the corner
if you just follow the rules:
Show yourself to be a good, romantic citizen,
buy the right stuff.
No wonder so many of us feel this enchantment.
But also, no wonder so many of us feel the purpose and hope
that is at the heart of romance.
This is where the marriage of romance and capitalism draws its strength:
we are being sold hope in increasingly hopeless times,
and we're buying it like never before.
Which brings me to the fifth and final thing I've learned about romance:
it's not all there is.
We do not need love Inc.,
we can feel hopeful and connected to others
by working together to face the future as communities, not as couples.
If we want a better future,
we're going to have to move beyond our own private happily ever after,
we're going to have to spend our resources and our emotional energy
on that communal future, and stop getting caught up in Love Inc.
I realise that this is hardly a love story I've told you,
but I hope it will leave you with the deeply romantic belief
that the future can be better than the present.
Thank you.
(Applause)