No Ladies, Love Is Not Like A Business. And Yes Love Is Enough.
There is perhaps no single more abominable indication of the shallowness of our times and the degradation of the modern mind than the notion that love is like a business – an idea which was presented to me by a single 33 year old female.
This insistence upon order in love according to a central principle that the objective should be a net transactional gain of some sort is most often not presented with any attempt at justification. Instead a modern day prejudice (namely that the true purpose of life is to profit from it) is presented as an eternal common sense truth – without any self-awareness, without any sense of the possibility that this conception of love could in fact be a reflection of a distinct period in history which is largely characterised by individual greed at the expense of personal sacrifice.
The single 33 year old female had previously explained that when she looked back at her reaction to splitting up with her ex-boyfriend, with hindsight she felt silly. I explained that I disagreed that the emotion one feels at being separated from a loved one could be done proper justice by describing it as “silly” - any more than love itself could be (because of course, the two are very much a package deal and one often accompanies another).
I sensed that prior painful experiences had perhaps encouraged her to (quite dishonestly) re-write her history today by disowning her own emotions and to think about future relationships through the limited, unfulfilling and ultimately always unsuccessful prism of romantic pragmatism.
I explained that there was one vital difference between love and business – namely that business, unlike love, was motivated by profit. I alluded to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as evidence of this vital difference, which she dismissed (perhaps predictably) as a “silly” story.
She then went on to explain that “Love is not enough” – a position which has been popularised amongst the unthinking masses relatively recently by the American “writer” Mark Manson.
Mr Manson did not write Romeo and Juliet. However he did write The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote “There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness."
However unlike Mark Manson, Friedrich Nietzsche is not alleged to have graduated from Boston University with a degree in International Business.
No, my readers. Mark Manson has a truly great mind. He is a visionary. A prophet even. And I am not in any way disappointed that so many modern women have subscribed to his great life philosophy.
It is perhaps just a shame that Mark Manson did not deem it appropriate to complete his sentence: “love is not enough….[for what exactly?]” If the success of a relationship is merely being equated with its longevity, for example, would we necessarily have to describe long unhappy marriages where couples remain together in one literal sense but quite apart in another more vital one as “successful”?
Mark Manson writes: “The only way you can fully enjoy the love in your life is to choose to make something else more important in your life than love.”
Although this might strike a discerning reader as an anti-spiritual position and indeed might not ring true with those mothers and fathers for whom their love for their children is indeed more important than anything else, those parents are all wrong. They are unable to appreciate the sheer depth and nuance of Mr Manson’s awe inspiring and quite deservedly best selling work.
Whilst we are on the subject of families, after Single 33 Year Old Female explained that love is indeed like a business in that love depends on the “attitudes, skills and responsibilities” of your partner, I asked her whether she loved her parents.
She replied that she did.
I asked her whether she loved them for their “skills, attitudes and responsibilities”.
She replied that she took my point.
I asked her whether she would love her own children for their “skills, attitudes and responsibilities”.
She replied that she took my point.
I asked her whether Donald Trump was necessarily very good at “love” because he was obviously very good at business.
She replied that she took my point.
I asked her whether she felt me a very worthwhile candidate for a partner with whom to settle down given my own professional status, salary and list of household name clients?
She replied that she took my point.
I asked her why divorce rates were so high amongst the first and second generation of women in the West to enter the world of business with men on (relatively) even terms. I asked her whether this correlation could in fact be patently explicable by the very tendency of those women to view relationships as a business transaction (in some bizarre ill-conceived extension of business minded rationality). I asked her whether it was possible that these women had fallen into the trap of trying to plan their relationships within the parameters of rationality, placing a “good bet” on their partners of choice, settling down with someone they knew they would be able to “work with” on a long term basis before the kids had been born and gone to school never to return and they looked at their husbands and asked themselves what the hell they were doing with them and if they had anything interesting left to talk about before deciding that compatibility was overrated and initiating divorce proceedings.
She replied that she took my point.
I asked her about the Darwinian principles of evolution that rule us meaning that as a matter of fact we are biologically engineered to simply choose a partner with whom we would most successfully pass our genes onto the next generation, which entailed a degree of individual sacrifice for a greater good potentially at the expense of a potential net individual gain.
She replied that she took my point.
I asked her about her Christian beliefs and whether Our Lord And Saviour Jesus Christ had died for our sins because it represented a good business move.
She replied that she took my point.
Finally I asked her whether she wanted to do dinner when the lockdown ends.
She replied that she took my point.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you and much love.
NB:
Single 33 Year Old Female had not in fact heard of Mark Manson - the greatest living thinker in the world today (which does not change the fact that he has popularised the idea). She had derived most of the inspiration for her “love is like a business” idea from an article in the equally authoritative AskMen.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s words are not to be misapplied by stalkers because stalking is a criminal and self-destructive act which does not accompany or follow love but narcissism.
The dinner invitation bit was included for comic effect. I would never date any woman who sees love as analogous to business.
I have not really read any of Mark Manson’s work and do not plan to in the immediate future. Perhaps this is another example of love not being enough or perhaps I simply do not give a f*ck. He does seem really intelligent though. Or as he would write, really really really f*cking intelligent.
24 June 2020:
Dude! Like. A f*cking update!!!
Having had a night to consider the merits of the “relationships are like a business” analogy, I think it is now time to conclude that it is a jaw droppingly bad one which if adopted by someone readily perhaps reveals more about their own view of life than they intended it to.
Given that the key driver of business (by its very nature and irrespective of how it is disguised) is profit, we are either forced by the analogy to suggest that this is also the key driver of relationships (in which case that understanding of relationships may need to be questioned) or that the analogy works despite this key and vital function of business not being applicable to relationships.
In the latter case it follows as a matter of logic that the analogy should simply be discarded.
Love is sacrifice at one level. Love is being prepared to sacrifice your needs for the needs of someone else. We see this often with parent-child relationships (which are often the purest expression of love). We see it perhaps less often with “romantic relationships” these days but that fact could in fact be explained by the very idea that people are not settling down with the person they love but are treating these relationships like business enterprises.
Even if we discard the profit seeking component of business and instead argue that in business you need to work with people you trust and share goals with, it does not explain the insistence of singling out the world of business as the analogy to make this point.
In a football team, for example, you need team mates around you who you can trust and depend upon and indeed who you share common goals with.
Furthermore although you might enjoy working with people in business who you can trust and depend upon, in fact the most successful people in business are not often the most reliable or trustworthy.
How did the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 begin?
What happened to Lehman Brothers?
How does advertising work?
If you are therefore simply reduced to saying that I like people I can trust and rely upon, it does not follow that there is necessarily any need to analogise with the world of business.
You would do better just to say what sort of people you enjoy spending time with than to analogise with an enterprise which is motivated by profit and very often by its nature entails a basic level of dishonesty anyway.
All of the above assumes that the most successful relationships work because of common goals and vision, which is not always true in any case. There are in fact much more mysterious forces at play in the most vital and alive relationships (such as chemistry) – some of which can be explained by evolution (whose purpose is to further the health of the species and not the individual). The relationships which lack these characteristics might in fact realise the more limited objectives that the people involved want them to but those objectives are a matter of individual preference which will not satisfy everyone and in fact tend only to satisfy those whose experience has encouraged them to modify downward their expectations.
These people therefore work backwards from a flawed and limited relationship model, which often follows expectations being lowered, and then seek to engineer a way to reach that model with the use of ill conceived and poorly thought out clichés.
As to the men who try to meet these expectations, I do not envy them.
