Over the past decade, a raft of self-help books has promised to furnish women with the ultimate means by which they can find happiness in their relationships. From the supposed modern classic The Rules to last year’s Sex and the Married Girl, these books are most notable for what they don’t talk about — love.
Rather than following your heart, if you follow these books you will learn to rely on your head and make hard judgements about how to succeed in your private life in much the same way that you strive to forge ahead in the public domain.
The new guru on the block, Rachel Greenwald, goes only a little further than her predecessors in taking the ideals of the marketplace into the home in the latest, self-evidently titled guide to gain popular currency, The Program: 15 Steps to Finding a Husband After Thirty.
”You, the reader, are the product,” she says, ”and The Program is a strategic plan to help you market yourself to find your future partner.”
She advises the single woman to create a ”personal brand” and to work quickly towards a deal: ”You have to remove or negotiate any deal-breakers such as religious practices or lifestyle differences.” Finally, the single woman must cut her losses if the buyer won’t come through: ”Thank him for not wasting your time any further and break up with him.”
Even if you wouldn’t be caught dead reading a self-help book, this sort of tone will surely sound familiar. Although there seems to be more discussion about marriage than ever right now, as people debate everything from why it is that marriages break up to why they personally cannot find a partner, the language in which the discussion is conducted is becoming less and less romantic.
Ever since the 18th century, romantic love — the irresistible passion that starts with helpless surrender to mutual desire and goes on to intense emotional intimacy — has been seen in the West as the ideal basis for an exclusive, lifelong union. But recently a pretty dramatic loss of faith in that core ideal means that when we hear romantic advice, it now seems to owe more to Machiavelli than to Petrarch.
Many commentators have tried to pin down a reason for the decline of what was once such a pervasive ideal. Really, the cultural drift against romance comes from such a diversity of roots — from psychoanalysis to evolutionary psychology, from women’s higher earning power to contraception — that it cannot be put down to a single source. However, the demonstrable failure of marriages based on love, in so many instances, has certainly driven this cultural change.
Now that divorce can seem like an unavoidable end to the majority of marriages, the pragmatic aspects of maintaining a lasting partnership may be more of a mystery than the sources of frenetic desire that exercised writers of previous centuries.
Although Greenwald and her ilk seem to be so anti-feminist in their assumption that marriage is always the ultimate aim of a woman’s life, these writers owe much to feminists of the past 50 years, and the effective work that some feminist writers, from Betty Friedan to Susan Maushart, have done in shattering the illusions of traditional romance.
Intriguingly, these self-help books often speak the language of feminism — they exhort women to feel empowered and to access a sense of self-worth — and they certainly follow the ability of certain feminists to strip romantic love of illusions.
It is entirely possible that this disillusioned emphasis on contracts and negotiations rather than dreams and desires might empower some women within their relationships.
But there is also a heavily traditional cast to these books — even if it is a different one from the romantic tradition. Typically, Greenwald advocates that women should find married women to act as matchmakers: ”Think of women of any age — what about one of your mother’s friends?” The reliance on matchmakers and rules, patterns and programmes, is indicative of a wider yearning for the rigid social structures that our culture has spent a century pulling down.
People in the West often seem to be looking with more interest at the idea that, in other cultures, romantic love is not seen as the only — or even an acceptable — basis for marriage. Beyond the self-help books, this loss of a sense of innate superiority in the Western ”love match” might be expressed through an equal cynicism about either kind of marriage.
Yet, however inexorable the loss of idealisation of romantic love is, and however many good things the loss may bring with it — from the greater value put on friendships to more realism about power play in the home — it can also feel like a real tragedy. It seems especially cruel when viewed from the pages of these self-help books.
Do we want to turn our private lives into a simulacrum of the marketplace? Do we want to turn the language of love into the language of the business school? Even those illusions that we know to be illusions are more vivid, more enlarging, more enlivening than such reductive and stifling pragmatism. — Â