Romantic Love: A Patriarchal Ploy
by rubyfruit2
February 14. It’s that time of year again. I remember it from days gone by. Wondering if I had far-off, unknown admirers who’d suddenly find bravery within and send me a card. Feeling the wistful disappointment when looking at an empty mat after the post had been. As a child, I made my mum a card and gave it to her and she said: “Someone loves me”. During some years, there were cute cards from my cats (yes it was my mum in return). For many years, there was a build up of suspense that, maybe, this year would be the year when a boy would notice I exist. Romantically. I was, after all, continuously sexually objectified in the street and that’s almost the same thing, isn’t it? It was easy-peasy after I started dating women. I got valentines cards without fail and flowers and presents at any time because most women have romance in their bones. Their very conditioning.
Ok stop right there. Let’s look at this. If there’s something women are encouraged to easily do but men aren’t then we can almost guarantee it’s something which works against women, not for them.
In many cultures, including where I live in the UK, “romantic love” is a cornerstone of compulsory heterosexuality. From as soon as we can understand words, we’re given messages about marriage, motherhood and romance. Jokes are made about the 3 year old boy down the road marrying us one day. We’re asked repeatedly who we want to marry when we grow up. It’s instilled in us, from birth, that our primary aim in life should be finding a male “soul-mate” who we can look after and live happily ever after with. If we don’t get that reinforcement often enough at home, then children’s fairy books make damned sure there’s back-up when required. Gender socialization starts from birth and we are read, as soon as possible, books which tell us about our place in the world as servers of men.
On the surface, perhaps, it all might seem innocent enough, if you’re prepared to accept this kind of propaganda at face-value. It’s only when we look deeper, from a radical feminist lens, we see the sinister implications of how “romantic love” works.
Centuries ago, women were controlled through economics; forced to be financially dependent on the patriarch. The only way they could survive was to be sold to the next patriarch (middle/upper class women) or to find a patriarch who had a chance of earning an income (poor/working class women). This form of control continues to exist but now needs strong back-up given that (some) women can earn a living wage based on their own training, education and skills.
That back-up is romantic myths. The idea that there is a man out there for all of us, who will love us, protect us, and nurture us. Forever. We have feedback that this must be true through the magazines we read, the books we buy and the films we see. Without fail, happy, successful heterosexual partnerships are mirrored back to us. On the rare occasions this is not the case, it is made clear these are exceptions in life, not the norm.
Who can blame women, then, when we naively seek “romantic love” which we think of as mutually nurturing, caring, emotionally equal relationships? Online dating sites are full of promise for the female romantic. Women seek connections and men seek casual fucks with sexually objectified women who, they believe, will be just like the tortured women in the porn they consume.
Our deeply conditioned belief in “romantic love” keeps us in abusive relationships. We look for deeper meanings, we say that “he loves me really” when he fails to live up to any kind of basic human standard, or “I can change him”. A belief in “romantic love” overrides experiences of beatings, rapes and psychological torture. We will find it, no matter what. We must. All the messages we have received from birth tells us it is there – what is wrong with us that we can’t find it? We are taught we are incomplete human beings without the love of a man. We must suffer in the hope that one day we might be given it. For real.
It is a Stockholm technique to keep females, as a class, trapped inside compulsory heterosexuality. Compulsory heterosexuality is designed to benefit men, as a class, at the expense of women, as a class. Imprisoning women or putting us in cages, will not work because we need to be free to carry out errands. They invented “romantic love”, instead, as a psychological cage with the aim of keeping us in our places until death.
As poverty bites hard in 2013, and as the welfare state shrinks, more and more women will be forced back into the home and into economic and financial dependency on men. Logic wouldn’t keep a slave as an unpaid drudge, meeting the financial, emotional, sexual and practical demands of men within the confines of compulsory heterosexuality. “Romantic love”, however, will fare so much better than a ball and chain.
sisterhoodispowerful 
This is excellent Rubyfruit, thank you. I had these same discussions years ago when as a student, studying social anthropology, I realised that romantic love is a functional construct that works for the benefit of men in patriarchal society. It is one of the most powerful tools of women’s oppression because so many of us buy into it uncritically, and the messages supporting it are everywhere. Reading anthropology I realised that not all cultures have a concept of romantic love, so that was my first wake up call. It is so important that as women we critique this stuff, it is so damaging. Thank you so much for writing this.
Great Valentine’s Day post, Rubyfruitz.
Another theme of romantic love is that the man will protect “his woman.” Keep her safe, even. Based in two things, really. The idea of woman as property, obviously, even written into some laws. But also, safety. Protection from other males, horrible, violent and predatory males. It’s a catch-22, a double bind, a damned-if-she-does and damned-if-she doesn’t scenario. Certainly part of the trauma-bonding. And women desperately want to be safe. Since no woman is ever safe. Especially in a relationship with a man.
I just this minute came across this book on amazon when looking up the Cordelia Fine book. I never read it, and it looked interesting. Wondering if anyone else has.Revolutions of the Heart: Gender, Power and the Delusions of Love by Wendy Langford.
St. Valentine’s Day massacre is more like it.
I’ve just recently had a dawning moment in the process of conceptualizing “compulsive heterosexuality,” and its tole on women. I knew that the stories told in the culture about prince charming were fantastical (after much deprograming that is) but you said it so on point and perfectly, “Romance.” Even if you KNOW we/she/women can and are still buying into romance.
As a man I always believed in romantic love as well, as a gay man I seek romantic love with a man. Does this also place me in a prison of sorts? I enjoyed this article but I am struggling to see if it could apply to non-heterosexual relationships and if a man and women both believe in this culturally constructed idea of romantic love, is it still a prison of the same kind
Well, you have come into the lion’s den so I shall respond. Many gay men, and I have known many, prosper within patriarchy on an individual level, despite being disadvantaged around sexuality. As a result, they don’t view aping heterosexual relationships as being problematic and are happy to replicate romance, marriage and other features of compulsory heterosexuality. For radical lesbian feminists, patriarchal systems are inherently oppressive and so we will question all social constructs and attempt to build alternative woman-loving ways of living. It doesn’t really matter whether a (heterosexual) man believes in romance or not, he still benefits from its existence at the expense of women,
Thank you for your reply. Considering we live in a culture created by and maintained by men, it comes as no surprise to me that even gay men would benefit from the patriarchy you speak of. I never considered romantic love as one possible agent of oppression against women. I think it does us all well to examine how our white, male, heterosexual culture continues to oppress non-white, women and gay people.
Since I, admittedly, stumbled upon this blog by accident and may be asking naive questions but I wonder, Does this imply that our very culture would have to change in order for a man and women to engage in a non-oppressive heterosexual relationship because Male Privileged is omnipresent in modern culture.
This = true.
The only part I would take issue with is your generalisation about online dating sites: “Women seek connections and men seek casual fucks with sexually objectified women who, they believe, will be just like the tortured women in the porn they consume.”
I understand you are using this generalisation for rhetorical effect, but it’s still unhelpful, and lets down an otherwise excellent exposition of the issues around romantic love and women. Men are also looking for connection. Men and women are both twisted up by patriarchy in different ways around how and where to look for that connection, and what it ought to look like. Patriarchy fucks with all of us.
This would make a blog post in and of itself and would make a very good research area. I don’t believe men use dating sites in the same way as women or for the same reasons. The majority of men use them as an extension of their consumption of pornography and approach women as sexually available “objects” and expect women to behave as if they are prostituted. They may attempt to disguise their motivations for a while, but they do eventually become clear, in most cases. One piece of evidence which points to this is the number of scamming online dating sites where men are fooled into handing over their credit card (or not as the case may be) in return for a promise of viewing a prostituted woman in sexually objectified ways – for which they’d have to pay. Men are behind these big business schemes and it’s women, as a class, who suffer from being viewed as a sexual commodity during her attempts to find heterosexual intimacy.
I had a prolonged period of time where I spoke to heterosexual women about their online dating experiences and it was a common and universal one.
Thank you very much for the clarification. It would make an extremely interesting research topic – and also to dig into what both heterosexual women and heterosexual men *think* they’re seeking. My conversations with heterosexual men lead me to believe that even in engaging with pornography, they are actually seeking connection. Of course, my sample is skewed by the kinds of heterosexual men I have conversations with.
And also by the fact that they are talking to a woman. I don’t know if you ever saw the piece written by a female-to-male trans person who said that being involved in male conversations as a perceived male was a completely different experience than as a female and that the experience was horrifically terrifying, knowing how deeply embedded the hatred and objectification goes. I think I saved it somewhere, if I find it, I’ll link it here
The futility and stupidity of romantic love has been one of my favourite rants for many years. My biggest pet peeve about romantic love is “love is blind”. The chemistry that makes for good het sex makes women blind to all the nastiness that they endure every day… Sexual chemistry is confounded with love in the initial phases, then in following years, Homo sapiens biological ability to “adapt” to even the horriblest of situations and make do with them (Stockholm syndrome at a societal level), people with simply stick to long term mates, because their “love” is now past the fun part and into the habitual part. I’ve listened to so many different but similar wordings of this.
But love is blind, and makes us accept all kind of shit. Then when the chemistry is gone, our eyes open and we see all the faults which were previously invisible to us.
Romantic love is like faith in gods, it is a delusion, better removed from our lives. For while we are “romantically in love” we are blind not only to our partner’s fault, but we are also blind to the misery caused by human excess onto the entire planet.
We need to do away with romantic love. Do away with all concepts of marriage. Do away with fiscal, health, legal, perks for people choosing to to live as two instead of one. Romantic love is intrinsically discriminatory to single people. But we single people and non breeders are growing in numbers. We females don’t need romantic love, for we don’t “need” to breed, for there are billions of people on this planet, more than enough. Let us all give our collective uteri a long vacation, boycott all breeding and romantic love. Let’s just enjoy sex freely, without the shackles of government oversight and fiscal calculations.
It’s good to get your thoughts on the topic “Northern Free Thinker”. I was thinking, only last night, as I watched “Town Bloody Hall” again, that there feels like something missing, at this stage of the “resurgence” of feminism and radical feminism. Well, a few things, actually, but one of the most important is a sense of how the future could be/will be different. In the 60s/70/80s women dreamed of creating a different world, new ways of relating with each other, of being, of existing, as a result of radical analysis.
I guess I need to be patient and it will come. At the moment, it feels like a few of us waking from a deep sleep, several decades old, shaking our heads and our fists and saying “no”. Next step is to decide what we want to re-create instead and how we will get there. Your post is part of that thinking.
It was a pleasure reading you. There is not enough like that out there in printed word.
I’m 46, and have run out of patience. 😦
With 40 years of liberal feminism, we’ve made some inroads into male dominated employment, little inroads into male dominated corporate/political leadership, and absolutely no improvement in male on female violence. My co-board members said the same thing, change takes a long time… but jeesh, we’re going on 75 years counting from the suffragettes! We started off on the right path, but then feminism became concerned with money and male egos… and we’ve been losing ground on several fronts… of which salaries. So no, I don’t think patience is the answer. I’d say it’s time to turn the heat up a few notches. Right now Queer and MRA politics are fighting with lots of money against feminism. We females possess much less wealth than our male counterparts, and we must recognise that patriarchy has started to gain back the little advances we thought we’d had. Boycotting breeding I did by tubal ligation when I was 30. I hope many more do the same. It was very freeing knowing I didn’t have to date all those “nice” guys who would have made “good daddies”. I no longer waste my time searching for Mr right. Hooray!
BIG UP !!!!
thank you!
No matter how “nice” a male is, it is still quite likely that he wants to screw most of the random women he sees and he will cheat at some point. Males only created marriage so that they have a companion and baby maker. I doubt that males are truly capable of love. I don t believe in romantic love and it’d be a cold day in hell before I trust a male period.