In ‘Under Capitalism,’ we look at how desire, intimacy, and relationships intersect with the logic of capitalism.

The Uniform Civil Code in Uttarakhand now makes it mandatory for couples in live-in relationships to register with the state. This is in tandem with “love-jihad” laws which criminalize interfaith relationships; indeed, restricting live-in relationships is a thinly veiled attempt to restrict interfaith, inter-caste relationships. As the state increasingly homogenizes love, there has been the parallel emergence of the “splinternet” – digital space which is also divided along the lines of community and identity. For all our rhapsodizing about free sex, hookup culture and empowerment, there remains the undeniable fact that dating apps direct our desires in ways not dissimilar to the state.

But the liberal narrative around dating apps and dating culture in urban India wouldn’t have you believe that. It looks like an infinite pool of opportunity: Tinder now alerts you when there’s a “swipe surge” so you can participate in the dating marketplace and acquire the best catch. The metaphors comparing dating to fishing are never more apt any place else: online dating apps are vast seas of produce, and the people on them are potential catches. Under capitalism, dating apps have monopolized the alternative to conservative ideals of arranged, “correct” partnerships – that an alternative exists, however, is only an illusion.

The paid version of apps offer another quantified version of the dating experience: pay more to get seen more, get unlimited swipes, and more customizable preferences. The philosopher Axel Honneth articulated the alienation it causes as a result: “One doesn’t need an overactive imagination to picture how [online dating platforms] might promote a form of self-relationship in which a subject no longer articulates his or her own desires and intentions in a personal encounter, but is forced merely to gather and market them according to the standards of accelerated information processing.”

We know how crappy it makes us feel – but not often have we stopped to consider: is the way we date today fundamentally prone to commodification? And is this way designed to maintain the conservative status quo?

According to Alfie Brown, Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at Royal Holloway University and the author of Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships, a “desirevolution” is underway. Brown defines it as “a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings.” According to this thesis, tech is ushering in that transformation. “Tech companies claim to be giving the subjects what they want, but are instead geared towards deploying tech which transforms what we want. They’re reordering our desires to suit their agendas,” Brown says. But what is their agenda? Collecting data, as we all know. But not just that: keeping us on the apps. Which means making them conducive to use within a 9-5 job framework. Far from being disruptive to structures, dating apps blend romantic prospects seamlessly into the structured labour day.

The advertisements for the apps would seem to imply a radically freeing new era of love. But it only stifles our ability – and time – to even think of love as something slow, as a means to build community, even solidarity. Love – and sex – must adhere to the rules of the algorithm and be instantly gratifying. As Brown puts it: “dating sites are specifically interested in organizing the desireconomy into particular class-oriented patterns to set the blueprint for a capitalism to come… they generate corporate profit while also preventing the development of mass culture of solidarity and resistance.” Ultimately, our relationships with our partners, short or long term, have turned into a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. And that end is capital. “Does your sex life boost your productivity? Oh YES,” reads one headline. A sex expert said that the secret to productivity is pleasure. Amid sex gurus and lifestyle advice rhapsodizing about the positive effects that sex, desire, dating and love have on a person’s productive output is the truth that we’ve increasingly allowed our desires themselves to service our employability, and vice versa. But where does that lead us, except further away from ourselves – and each other?

No wonder we’re exhausted: love has become another thing to optimize, consume, and compete for, in addition to our jobs. If we acquire financial capital through work, on dating apps it translates directly into romantic capital – indeed, they incentivize us into thinking of ourselves as capital. Think travel photos, bar-hopping, date nights oriented around consumption.

Added to that, as Anne Helen Petersen noted, being single is a financial disadvantage compared to being in a relationship. As rents skyrocket, unemployment rises, layoffs loom large and costs of living rise, being single and living alone sounds less exciting than ever. And so, consciously or unconsciously, the pursuit of romance has higher stakes – it’s less a game of serendipity and more a dizzying game of Russian roulette. There’s less room for exploring, making mistakes – or as Zoe Rasbash puts it, “We’ve lost the art of sustaining good relationships and sustaining desire and pleasure within the structure of good relationships. And instead, we’re shifting to a commodity version of moving onto the next thing as soon as the first thing starts to not function as well.”

Treating each other – and ourselves – as commodities being a factor of capitalism isn’t a new observation. The Bolshevik revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai observed more than a century ago that “Bourgeois society was built on the principles of individualism and competition and has no place for friendship as a moral factor. Friendship does not help in any way, and may hinder the achievement of class aims.” And these class aims are aligned with what the right-wing wants: to keep women on the backfoot, extract unpaid labour from them in heterosexual households, and sustain the economy on underpaid marginalized women. We’re dating apolitically, as if these things are no longer true – which makes them invisible and, as a result, dehumanizing when they inevitably manifest.

Dating apps made all of this more efficient. As Rufus Griscom observed in Wired way back in 2002 about “online personals,” looking for love online does away with the idea that “love is a chance event,” since “serendipity is the hallmark of inefficient markets.” Sociologist Kristen R Ghodsee also said, “Dating apps… make everyone feel like their time is so valuable and that finding a partner should be done with the utmost speed. You don’t want to just go and chat someone up in a bar when they might not go home with you. It feels like a waste of your time. These things have a very real impact on our relationships.”

No wonder, then, that there’s a lot of talk about the loneliness epidemic and a “sex recession” – another marketized form of thinking about sex as a scarce commodity, which uncannily dovetails into incel-speak if you push it far enough. As Jess Cotton wrote in Jacobin, “This social context would recognize the material and structural forces that produce lonely cultures and bad sex: a world of privatized relations; the evisceration of desire by the algorithm; and the intensity and hours of work that for most people make dating feel like a sunk cost that cannot easily be recouped.”

The devaluation of care is evident all around us: in the discourse around what we do and don’t owe each other under the ambit of hookup culture, in the debates around the ethics of sex, how different types of relationships trigger different degrees of care, and how ultimately, it’s all about what we can get away with in terms of satisfying our wants without being deemed a terrible person. In the tussle over what we do and don’t owe to another person according to which parameters, businesses have successfully co-opted our desires as capital: dating apps collect our data, relationship or dating coaches tell us the dos and don’ts of love and etiquette, and social media capitalizes off our attraction towards commodities and the appearance of love, rather than the actual experience. 

In response to all this unhappiness, polyamory became a thing for a hot minute. But that, too, remains an individual choice – indeed, gentrified within the elite – to be a sustainable means of dismantling capitalist framings of love and partnership today. Feminist interventions into love, dating and sex have focused, for a while, on centering women’s pleasure – an enterprise which has given rise to a whole industry, as The Swaddle noted earlier. But it has also prompted introspection into sexual dynamics among partners – especially in heterosexual contexts – where there’s emphasis on evaluating how much who is “giving” or “receiving.” Recently, these types of assessments have spilled over into queer spaces as well, where discourse about “pillow princesses” in lesbian relationships who “do nothing” has prompted a larger question about how we’re treating sex overall, and how we act like it’s all about quantifying pleasure as given or taken but rarely experienced.

The logic of competition disguised as reciprocity has become a major part of the discourse on relationships now. On reels and TikToks, a new genre of assessing partners and lovers based on little tests and tasks has taken over: will they peel an orange for you? How would they react to a prank? What will they say or do to this or that situation? All this assumes that there is a right way to be – which strips a person of context and reduces them to predictable, modifiable entities. In other words, we commodify ourselves into what looks like liberation, based on tangible characteristics we can objectively assess in another person.

And again, we’ve lost sight of the context: ultimately, capitalist apps force us to gamify people, while the state keeps eroding our pool of options into smaller and smaller groups. Both work together seamlessly.

That’s the tyranny of trying to love under capitalism: the personal becomes apolitical. It’s all give or take; and people, accordingly, are reduced to a sum of parts and capabilities.

As Sophie K. Rosa notes in the book Radical Intimacy, “The possibility of meaningful agency in this sphere will not come from the proliferation of polyamorous life coaches advertising their services on Instagram, nor from the representation of ‘queer families’ or ‘chosen families’ in mainstream advertising campaigns. Liberation requires structural change – from secure housing for all, to freedom from exploitation at work, to free childcare.” In other words, “‘Radical’ sex and relationships won’t topple capitalism, but toppling capitalism might just make them possible.”