Capitalism Fetishizes Desire in the Search for “The One” — And It’s Not Limited to Dating Apps

I: INTRODUCTION

In the academic space, as well as the non-academic media space (Youtube video essays, etc.), we can notice a plethora of critiques or analyses of various tendencies and currents of thought in how we approach modern dating and relationships. We have analyses of incels/black pillers, the red pill alpha male space, sex-negative feminism, sex-positive feminism, queer anti-assimilationism, traditionalist gender roles, and the list goes on.

What every example in my above list has in common is that they stand out to us as ideologies — hence the satisfying number of opinions about them. The fact they stand out to us as ideology proves exactly the fact that they are not the ruling ideology of the predominant socio-economic system: capitalism. All of the beforementioned ones can be co-opted by capitialism, and none of them are anti-capitalist in essence (though some can become by accident) — but all in all they stand in a mostly indifferent relationship to our economic system; occasionally either accelerating its growth or putting a wrench in its production, as a mere aftereffect and not as an inherent aim of the current itself.

There is a ruling ideology of capitalism in our pervasive dating culture, however. But there is an incredibly minuscule amount of work discussing it, because as Slavoj Zizek teaches us, pure ideology does not present itself as ideology — it hides in plain sight.

I can almost count on one hand the number of authors I’ve seen in the academic space attempting to provide a holistic analysis of the phenomenon as a whole: Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Eva Illouz, Byung-Chul Han, Srecko Horvat and perhaps Todd McGowan in a single chapter at one point.

The online space, both in mass media and in video essay-type documentaries, is also mostly silent about what I can only describe as “neoliberal dating culture”. The only thing coming close to a mass media approach on this topic is the recent wave of video essays criticizing dating apps, and they are well-welcomed from my side. However, I haven’t yet been able to find one Youtube video connecting dating apps incentives and advice culture to the underlying machinery of capitalist ideology — hence the critique does not critique the ideas as structured phenomenon with an underlying ideological logic in the same way we critique incels, conservatives or feminists.

I don’t want to be misunderstood: there is an abundance of opinions and ‘takes’ (both online and academic) about almost every individual aspect of neoliberal dating culture. However, there is extremely little content tying it all together and presenting it as a coherent set of connected ideas. When we notice someone having a take about incels or sex-negative feminists, we see it as a critique of a certain ideology, or at least as a critique of a system of intercorrelated ideas with some level of internal coherence. The abundance of takes of indidivudual aspects of neoliberal dating culture are observed by most people as simply “takes”, as mere opinions that are not a position towards an underlying system of thought with a structural logic.

This essay will attempt to describe the main defining aspects of neoliberal dating culture, how they connect to Marx’s commodity-fetishism and Deleuze & Guattari’s theory of axiomatics, and explain why it is a culture that is not limited to dating apps, and that existed before dating apps as well as right now outside of them (but that nevertheless is turned in its most explicit form by dating apps, which exageratte and accelerate its worst aspects).

I will also touch upon a generic “conservative” dating culture, considering the recent wave of sex-negative attitudes and critiques of ‘the sexual revolution’ (most prominent public figures coming to mind right now being Jordan Peterson and Louise Perry) — and explain why they are noticing a very real problem in our current landscape while being wrong about its cause and its solution (as is usual for conservative ideology).

II: NEOLIBERAL DATING CULTURE

Let’s start with dating apps, as this is a common point of analysis and the moment where ideology becomes most explicit. The common critique of dating apps goes as follows:

1. They mediate desire: less attention is spent towards the person you are matched with and more is spent towards seducing the algorithm of the app itself, in order to get more matches.

2. They commodify desire: people are turned into objects and forced to sell themselves on the market like commodities in capitalism — your profile picture is merely an object on a shelf.

3. Too many choices leads to a pervasive fear of missing out (FOMO), which paradoxically leads to a search for “the one”. Imperfection and failure is not tolerated.

4. Gambling-like addictive nature (the CEO of Tinder used to work before on games like Candy Crush).

5. “Shopping list”-like behavior: you are a self-transparent subject who knows his/her needs and must communicate them transparently in order to match them with a person who can satisfy them. Love and sex are no longer about intimacy and connection but about need-satisfaction: I have my shopping lists of demands, you have yours, and we exchange it.

Let’s now put aside dating apps and focus on something seemingly different. To exemplify how the neoliberal dating culture does not limit itself to the dating app sphere, I will paraphrase from memory the following comment I once read on Reddit a year or two ago (the source is irrelevant as all of you have heard this multiple times already):

“Be clear about your intentions and transparent about your needs to make sure the other person is also on the same page about it so that you don’t waste people’s time. And if you still haven’t figured out what you want, then please don’t try to enter the dating market, as you will get other people’s hearts broken.”

This piece of advice (and related variations of it) is not always given by people who like or use dating apps — yet nevertheless follows the exact same market logic. To understand why, we must first ask ourselves: what is the worst thing that can happen if someone does not follow the advice? Unlike what conservatives think would happen if you were to not follow their norms (the fall of western civilization, gays raping all your women or 20% of men stealing all the women — all catastrophic conclusions, even if unfounded, they would be big if real) — the problems liberals worry about are always first-world problems.

In our case, they have two problems: people’s time being wasted and people’s hearts being broken. Time being wasted and hearts being broken are what we would call examples of negativity in Hegelian terms, or examples of anti-production in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms. They put a stop in the circulation of flows, they slow down production and consumption of desire. The capitalist imperative is to be as efficient and productive as possible.

Combining this view with the earlier description of Youtube critiques of dating apps as incetivizing fear of missing out in the eternal search for “the one”, we can see the connection between the two now.

The neoliberal dating culture expounds smoothness. The experience of the search for love and sex must not have any gaps or cracks within it, nor any obstacles to my satisfaction of needs. I must have a pre-determined list of “desires” (which are actually needs in the Lacanian sense) — what I want out of a relationship: long-term, short-term, casual, serious, and so on. And I must have a “type” I’m looking for. But you can’t want anything you wish — you must choose from a predetermined list of wants that ideology presents to you, anything else is incoherent and prevents the smooth circulation of flows within the system. In other words: you come to the dating market with a shopping list, and you have to match with another person having a shopping list as similar as possible to yours so that you waste as little time as possible (fear 1) on failed relationships that will make you suffer (fear 2).

We can connect this to two philosophical ideas: desire-fetishism (analogous to Marx’s commodity fetishism) and the replacement of codes with axiomatics within capitalist globalization (described by Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus).

Commodity fetishism is Marx’s theory that in capitalism, relations between people are mediated by relations between commodities (between objects). If I trade 20 yards of linen for one coat (the famous example), the market exchange establishes that the labor required to produce 20 yards of linen is of equal value to the labor required to produce one coat. This establishes, in turn, a relationship of power and comparison between the workers who produced the coat vs. the workers who produced the linen. So, the exchange between coat and yards of linen is actually an exchange between how certain humans are valued, but it’s mediated or abstracted away by a simple market exchange between two sets of objects.

Capitalism fetishizes desire in the same way: desire is fundamentally a relationship between people, between two subjects, not between a subject and an object. Desire is not the relationship between one person and an object that they want for whatever reason, it is a relationship to other people, who are also desiring, and to society and culture at large. Lacan famously said that “desire is the desire of the Other” which means both that what we want tends to depend on what other people around us want, but also that we want to be wanted by Others.

Desire-fetishism is the analogous process in neoliberal culture in which human desire (a relationship between people) is mediated by a relation between two shopping lists of needs (between two objects).

Dating apps did not invent this, but they made the problem worse by making it explicit. On Tinder for example, when you create your profile, you can choose between a pre-determined list of relationship types and relationship goals (of course, there is no free-form text field in which you can enter anything, as you’re not allowed to want anything you desire). The relationship types you can choose from are monogamy, ethical non-monogamy, open relationship, polyamory and “open to exploring”.¹ The relationship goals you can choose from are ‘Long-term partner’; ‘Long-Term, open to short’; ‘Short-term, open to long’; ‘Short-term fun’; ‘New friends’; or ‘Still figuring it out’².

What is funny to observe is that any combination between the five relationship types and six relationship goals is possible. For example, you can search for “open relationship” + “long-term partner” vs. “monogamy” + “short-term fun”, likely leading to the Tinder algorithm matching you differently. Of course, the difference between the two combinations is like the difference between coffee without milk and coffee without cream.

Which leads us to the second comparison to philosophical concepts: the transformation of codes into axiomatics. From a Deleuzian perspective, capitalism never liberated desire. It just deterritorialized sex from feudal codes (marriage, family, patriarchy) and reterritorialized it under the axiomatics of the global market. While sex is getting more and more distanced from kinship obligations and familial structures (qualitative logic, Marxian use-value), it is being recaptured under flexible and exchangeable axiomatics (quantitative logic, Marxian exchange-value): Tinder matches, likes, dating markets, body counts — you are a number in the machine.

The modern day dating market does not lack social norms, it is not a permissive deterritorialized chaos like conservative ideology views it. It is actually extremely restrictive and repressed, just in a different way. The “sexual revolution” never took place. The social norms are simply less local, the unwritten rules governing sex nowadays are axiomatic instead of coded. Here is how Deleuze and Guattari describe the difference:

“As we shall see, capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit.”³

The three main aspects of axiomatics are:

1. Quantitaive logic (as opposed to the qualitative logic of codes)

2. Output depends on input (as opposed to codes which are a constant function)

3. Logic follows the mechanism of exchange and comparison, making it non-local by definition

The feudal despotic machines of the middle ages coded value as tied to land and thus geographic location, while capitalism brought with it globalization and thus a flexible and quantitative, instead of qualitative, notion of value: anything can be exchanged on the market with anything else.

The main axiomatic driving neoliberal dating culture is thus: do what you want, but make sure what you want is selected out of a list of predetermined options that ideology picks for you, and make sure you pick that option before the encounter with the other person so that you don’t waste your time or break someone’s heart accidentally.

This is not a code, this is an axiomatic, and it follows the exchange-value logic of capitalism. A code might be something like “Only have sex after marriage” or “Do not have casual sex”. Their value is constant across context. Axiomatics are instead context-dependent functions whose output changes depending on the input — they don’t tell you what to do in all circumstances, they tell you what to do depending on what you want. Then, I give you might list of ‘wants’, you give me your list of ‘wants’ and if they match, we mutually satisfy each other.

Lastly, after viewing this through the lens of Marx and D&G, the Lacanian perspective is even more interesting: desire fetishism pressupposes that my desire is mediated by a relationship between objects. This means that I must turn myself into an object for the Other. And the other also is an object for me, but this is important: the object we turn ourselves into is a partial object (a la Klein) and not objet petit a.

This is what the fear of missing out today is all about. At its most fundamental level lies an emotional contradiction: on one hand, I want to find the ultimate enjoyment, I want to find ‘the one’ so I can finally settle. On the other hand, no person I find is good enough, I always want something more, something even better, someone even closer to perfection. So from a desire to stop finding partners, I look for more and more partners. The stated want is for me to finally find “the one”, the perfect partner so I can stop searching. But I know that my time is limited and that there are so many fish in the sea that I need to be as efficient as possible, otherwise I won’t find them.

Hence, there is an extreme fear of anything that might slow down this process. That is why we have to be as clear as possible about our intentions: the more time I ‘waste’ with someone that doesn’t want exactly what I think I want (and that doesn’t expect the relationship to last the same amount of time), the less time I have to find the one. But, in this process, I end up sleeping with as many people as possible, negating my initial stated desire and constantly switching. The more I want to stop switching partners, the faster I have to switch partners, because that will (make me believe) I will get closer in a faster way to finding “the one” and stopping this process. It’s almost as if Landian accelerationism was applied to dating with a taste of unintentional dialectics.

Notice the list of possible “relationship goals” that you can choose from on Tinder: long-term partner, short-term fun, long-term and open to short, short term and open to long… The more you think about them the less they make sense. Why does ideology condition us to have an expectation of how long a relationship is supposed to last? The non-ideological answer would have you believe that a relationship is going to last however much it’s going to last: if we get along and love each other it might last 30 years and there’s no reason for me to end the relationship prematurely just because I was looking for ‘short-term fun’; while if we don’t like each other then it will last 3 days and there’s no reason for me to prolong the relationship indefinitely if it was never meant to be.

But if your unconscious drive was to find “the one”, then the other is not a real object of desire but a mere partial object that acts as a potential stepping stone to finding your real true love. In that case, the two people need to match on their expectations of how much they are willing to spend, on average, on such an attempt, even if it rarely materializes into practice — the fantasy is the only thing that’s important about it.

This is not very different from the premise of “Hang The DJ”, the Black Mirror episode: a dystopian future (present?) in which an all-knowing machine learning algorithm uses your current relationships as training data in order to find your ultimate compatible partner from the entire globe, all while the algorithm decides how long each relationship is going to last. The episode exemplifies the unconscious mechanism driving the neoliberal subject to seek and switch partners today, without admitting it to themselves — the algorithm is a metaphor for our own unconscious. In the Black Mirror episode, the characters know from the very beginning how long a relationship is going to last and that it will end after 3 days or 3 years for example, so they already start from the assumption that they will never settle with that person; they will enter that relationship for the sole purposes of generating training data that will help the algorithm find out their actual real match they will settle with. In real life, we know that unconsciously, but do not accept it: the algorithm here is the unconscious, which is the discourse of the big Other.

III: CONSERVATIVISM

We can already see there never was a sexual revolution or liberation of desire in the true sense (and perhaps there shouldn’t be one?) — desire is as constrained by rules as it was in the middle ages. It is just that these rules are context-dependent and follow the logic of the market. You choose from a pre-determined list of wants, turn yourself to an object and mediate your desire through a relationship between two shopping lists of demands. If you do not follow this, it means you are confused, you are wasting people’s precious time or are even manipulative, willing to break people’s hearts by giving them false expectations. You have to know what you want before the encounter, but you have to pick from a list of wants that ideology chooses for you. And God forbid you define ‘the one’ as someone who changes what you desire, or love as a process in which two people build their desire from the ground up.

Nevertheless, conservative critiques of the sexual revolution start from the assumption that we are in some sort of permissive chaos where anything is allowed. Jordan Peterson, in a podcast with Joe Rogan, popularized the idea that if society started accepting non-monogamy, we would end up with 20% of men having harems with 80% of the women and the rest being lonely. When confronted by Joe Rogan on whether we should actually force monogamy on people, Peterson responded that the law should not be involved but that instead, we should treat consensual non-monogamy in the same way we treat cheating (through shame, etc.).

Louise Perry, a sex-negative feminist, extended on this idea of the Pareto 20/80 principle, and further critiqued the sexual revolution by arguing it is more favorable to men than to women because men like casual sex more than women and are less likely to fall in love after sexual intercourse (which is debatable, since men are more likely to fall in love when you give them a compliment or a smile).

A few questions come up in this analysis to both of them. Firstly, what is actively preventing society right now from reaching that dystopic state where 20% of men ‘have’ 80% of the women? This is an interesting perspective because we are used to the right-wing defending human nature. While the left usually does not care about human nature in defining their political arguments (with Noam Chomsky’s defense of universal grammar as a notable exception), the right believes in a human nature and argues that anything that deviates this human nature disrupts a natural equilibrium or ‘default’ state of society and is therefore to be avoided. For the economic right, capitalism is human nature and anything that stands in its way is evil because it’s against nature. For the cultural right, homosexuality might be against nature, making it bad, for instance.

But in the arguments given by Peterson and Perry, human nature is actually evil here. They argue that if we were to leave people on their own without society artificially intervening, we would reach an undesirable ‘equilibrium’ of the dating market in which most men would be single and become violent. So it’s a perversion of the true right, because while the right believes that human nature exists and is good, they believe that human nature (in this context) is evil and we must actively repress it. It’s like Freud’s analysis in ‘Civilization and its discontents’ but turned upside down.

Secondly, we must ask: how is it possible for there to be a ‘natural state’ of something that only existed for roughly two centuries and a half? Three of four centuries ago there was no dating at all — virtually all marriages were arranged under feudalism in the middle ages, so such an analysis wouldn’t even have the opportunity to be false, it would simply not make sense.

Nevertheless, I can give the conservative attitude 1% more credit than the neoliberal one. Conservative ideology actually notices a real contradiction within capitalism and admits there is a problem, and the problems it identifies are real and legitimate. What it gets wrong is the diagnosis (the cause) and the solution. What I am convinced of is that the river is poisoned. The conservatives believe that the fish are to blame, while the liberals don’t even believe the water is poisoned at all but instead think our biggest problem is that we can’t get everyone to drink it quick enough.

The benefit of the doubt in the conservative ideology can only be given in the context of its form, and not its content, as the content is gibberish. Once we read between the lines and notice the underlying emotion driving the critique, we can see a real problem being addressed: intimate relationships being turned into business relationships under capitalism. This outlines many critiques conservatives have about “hook-up culture”: they correctly notice that the way it manifests, especially in the way it’s presented in the media, is like a cold and lifeless business transaction in which humans are mere sets of partial-objects, almost like prostitution without money. Their fallacy is in attributing this to polygamy or permissiveness, when in reality the exact same critique can be applied to the most monogamous and conservative of relationships when operating under neoliberal dating culture.

Even Zizek sometimes falls prey to this discourse, although to a much less extent. Notice his example in this interview section where he talks about polyamory:

“I’m not a moralist, I don’t care if people do it. But for me, there is still something absolutely exclusive about loving just one person. Because, when you have polyamory, it’s usually too pragmatic: I need you for intense sex, I need you for fun, etc. That is not love for me, love is not about satisfying your needs, love is a kind of a metaphysical, absolute trust. Love is: I cannot live without you, and I’m willing to change because of you. (…) Precisely today in our world where the ideology is “experiment with yourself, don’t get fixed on something”, I don’t find this satisfying.”⁴

Zizek was absolutely on point in the description of true love and the critique of ‘need-satisfaction’ as a misunderstanding of what human connection is actually about, but we must ask: isn’t this pragmatism prevalent in today’s ideological landscape in monogamous relationships just as much?

REFERENCES:

1: https://au.tinderpressroom.com/relationshiptypes

2: https://au.tinderpressroom.com/datingsunday2023

3: Anti-Oedipus, pg. 139

4: Slavoj Zizek on marriage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQexgB6O58