For people on the Left, nothing seems easier than sitting in one’s study, nightcap on, brooding over the defects of capitalism and posting lofty takes on social media. I could do that too, but playing the cynic isn’t really my style. The dramatic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—and China and Vietnam’s turn toward market economies—did not settle the debate. If anything, many people now think their countries need more “socialism,” meaning more government intervention. Online, plenty of well-educated young people say capitalists should be “strung up on lampposts,” blithely ignoring the economic consequences, as if they themselves never needed to look for a job.
After the twentieth century’s many experiments, most would concede that a centrally directed, command-style planned economy is a dead end. It’s said that members of the Soviet State Planning Committee sat in their guarded Moscow offices setting prices for more than 24 million distinct goods. These were neither the producers nor the sellers nor the buyers of those goods, and yet they were tasked with pricing things they had never laid eyes on. The absurdity is obvious to us now, but few at the time felt it so strongly. And the consequences went far beyond people simply queueing for necessities. So today’s debate, broadly speaking, is about how large a role the government should play within a market economy—synonymous with capitalism, in my view.
Economics isn’t my specialty, so let’s start from everyday life. As with debates about economic systems, some people feel a peculiar nostalgia for the old socialist order when it comes to romantic love. The New York Times ran an op-ed titled “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism,” by an American scholar of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The piece argued that in socialist countries the “work unit” provided women with basic security, maternity leave, and free childcare, which gave them economic independence. And now? After the transition to markets, women face greater pressure at work and come home “too tired to do anything with their husbands.” Some studies find that compared with West German women, or women in unified Germany, East German women reported more frequent orgasms and higher sexual satisfaction. In short, socialism supposedly meant more “leisure,” i.e., more private time—hence more, and more satisfying, sex.
We hardly need historical socialism to teach us the importance of private time for sex. Imagine a man and a woman stranded on a deserted island: they spend their days figuring out how to survive and have nothing to do at night—of course they’ll have more, and probably better, sex than average people. The key correlation here is between leisure and sex, not socialism and sex. Socialism may provide leisure, but so did the ancient world. While we lack data on sexual satisfaction in antiquity, I wouldn’t be surprised if a historian told us it surpassed today’s. Many picture premodern life like this: without electric lights, with nothing to do at night, people simply “went to bed.” That picture may well be correct.
But sexual satisfaction is not the same thing as romantic love. Sex is primarily about physical pleasure and gratification; romantic love is mainly a spiritual life, even though sex is its foundation. Sex is not the hallmark of romantic love.
So what difference does capitalism or socialism make to romantic life? Because romantic love cannot be quantified the way sex can, we lack direct comparables. Still, the Chinese historical experience is clear: only after Reform and Opening did the ideal of free courtship make a real comeback. I say “comeback” because students and the educated classes in the Republican era had already embraced it. Between those two eras of praising free love lay the socialist period, when one saw families everywhere but romantic love almost nowhere. Romantic love certainly existed, but celebrating it was branded as a “petty-bourgeois” notion to be criticized.
This essay isn’t trying to analyze, from first principles, the general relationship among socialism, capitalism, and romantic love. That would be impossible in a single piece. Instead I want to respond to a familiar left-intellectual critique of capitalism.
A chorus of left-wing hand-wringing and world-weary cynicism insists that capitalism is damaging romantic love—pick your verbs: “ending,” “alienating,” “withering,” and so on. Lacan is said to have remarked: “Capitalist discourse has disempowered castration; it wants to know nothing about love!” Sociologist Eva Illouz deems Lacan “entirely right.” In 2020 she published La Fin de l’amour (The End of Love), making herself the latest doomsayer. Needless to say, Shizuko Ueno also ranks among the sociologists who indict capitalism alongside romantic love.
Here I’ll focus on Erich Fromm, the German-American social psychologist and psychoanalyst, a member of the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School drew heavily on Marx and generally viewed modern capitalism critically.
In my review of Nathaniel Branden’s work, I already noted a fatal flaw in Fromm’s basic theory of love, and Branden called it out by name. Fromm acknowledges romantic love’s exclusivity but oddly denies its legitimacy—he writes: “Human beings are, in essence, all the same; we are both part of the whole and the whole itself; therefore, in practice, it makes no difference whom one loves.” This is the sort of asylum-level pronouncement that clashes with what the vast majority intuit about romantic love. It even calls into question Fromm’s credentials as a psychologist.
Chapter 3 of Fromm’s The Art of Loving is titled “Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society.” Like every Western Marxist, Fromm claims that capitalist society “alienates modern man from himself, his contemporaries, and nature.” Supposedly “everything—spiritual and material alike—becomes an object to be exchanged and consumed.” In such a context, the individual “strives to adapt to the demands of exchanging, accepting, and consuming,” becoming an “automaton.” Fromm continues:
The situation as far as love is concerned corresponds, as it has to by necessity, to this social character of modern man. Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain. One of the most significant expressions of love, and especially of marriage with this alienated structure, is the idea of the “team.” In any number of articles on happy marriage, the ideal described is that of the smoothly functioning team. This description is not too different from the idea of a smoothly functioning employee; he should be “reasonably independent,” co-operative, tolerant, and at the same time ambitious and aggressive. Thus, the marriage counselor tells us, the husband should “understand” his wife and be helpful. He should comment favorably on her new dress, and on a tasty dish. She, in turn, should understand when he comes home tired and disgruntled, she should listen attentively when he talks about his business troubles, should not be angry but understanding when he forgets her birthday. All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well-oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a “central relationship” but who treat each other with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better.
In this concept of love and marriage the main emphasis is on finding a refuge from an otherwise unbearable sense of aloneness. In “love” one has found, at last, a haven from aloneness. One forms an alliance of two against the world, and this egoism a deux is mistaken for love and intimacy.
Fromm regards this frictionless, companionate model as “the form of love’s disintegration in Western society,” because the spouses never reveal their individuality in the marriage.
The Art of Loving appeared in 1956—nearly seventy years ago—and we can now test his prophecy. It’s simple: he was wrong. Romantic love in today’s West is in the best condition it has ever been in human history. That doesn’t mean perfection; we do see many problems, especially the troubling phenomena of the Tinder era. But only figures like Eva Illouz would brand these as the “end” of romantic love. Recent surveys show that in both the United States and Japan, a bit over 80 percent of young women say that even if a prospective partner meets all their criteria, if romantic love doesn’t develop, they will not consider marrying him. Historically, this ideal became widespread in the United States in the 1970s, with Japan following roughly in step. Fromm’s frictionless ideal couple bears little resemblance to today’s ideal of romantic partners.
The sort of articles Fromm read in his day—Dale Carnegie’s 1938 How to Win Friends and Influence People follows the same pattern—are now hard to find on the English-language internet. In fact, later editions of Carnegie’s book dropped his marriage advice. If you want to know what contemporary writing on love looks like, read The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic—especially the Times’s “Modern Love” column. These writers are talking about genuine romantic love, a world apart from the “love” texts Fromm had in front of him.
So where did Fromm go wrong? I think he made three mistakes.
First, he conflated marriage with romantic love. Marriage is not the same thing as romantic love; they are distinct concepts. Unlike today’s American ideal of the “self-expressive” (or self-actualizing) marriage, the mainstream 1950s American ideal really was “companionate marriage”—and Fromm correctly identified that. But he then confused marriage with romantic love. The frictionless couple he described is an idealized marital model, not a model of romantic love. In the companionate era, romantic love had not yet fully fused with marriage; that large-scale fusion would come only after the 1970s. In other words, in Fromm’s time romantic love wasn’t “withering”—it had not yet begun. Today, the ideal is not a frictionless couple but a pair who truly love each other, know how to handle conflict well, and pursue self-realization together.
Second, companionate marriage did not arise from capitalist “alienation.” Left intellectuals often believe they’ve found the root cause of everything—this faux-depth has bewitched generations of students—but the world isn’t as they imagine. In the companionate era, women’s social role was primarily that of homemaker, and it was the gendered division of labor—men outside, women inside—that shaped the ideal. The man was the family’s economic provider; the woman, the household’s manager. In that context, offering emotional support to her husband was often treated as part of the homemaker’s role (even if not a moral obligation). Of course, husbands also recognized their role in supporting their wives emotionally—after all, the other party wasn’t an “automaton,” as Fromm says, but a person with fluctuating moods. Coming home to an unhappy wife makes for an unhappy husband, too.
Third, Fromm went looking for an ideal model of marriage in self-help literature. That’s like asking a mechanic what makes a great car, instead of asking designers or devoted enthusiasts. A mechanic’s “great car” is one that rarely breaks and is easy to fix—only one dimension of design. The self-help books of Fromm’s day were crude by today’s standards (hence later editions of Carnegie omitting sections), and their methods were heavy-handed. They presented a pristine ideal without bothering to ask how people could actually achieve it. The result was an impossible image of a no-friction marriage—not an ideal model at all, but a repair manual.
Were it not for history having already disproved Fromm, some readers of The Art of Loving might still take his self-assured pronouncements at face value. Unfortunately, many readers today, even after the intervening decades, still fail to read the book critically—and under the influence of figures like Shizuko Ueno or Eva Illouz—assert that capitalism is burying romantic love. The relationship between capitalism and romantic love is complex. But we should begin by acknowledging the main positives before we consider the downsides. Only then can we see the whole and grasp the balance.
Leave a Reply