'Why two?'

coupledom, capitalism and 'different kinds of love'

People often conflate romantic partnership with domesticity. I admit I’m guilty of this myself. As single people, if we live alone we might bemoan having to cook for ourselves all the time, never having anyone to bring us tea or coffee in bed in the morning, the absence of daily human companionship and little acts of intimacy in our domestic lives. There’s all the practical and financial stuff: housework and DIY and the immense expenditure required in running a household alone. But if you think about it, technically, for the most part these are byproducts of living alone and not necessarily of a life without romantic love.

Of course in reality it’s true that in our society romantic love, if you want to call it that, does often involve two people living together, but there is no intrinsic relationship between homemaking and coupledom. It is also true though that the couple unit is structurally embedded in our housing market and economy; this is also deeply embedded in the culture and further entrenched by a ton of consumerist propaganda. Look at the bank advertisements for mortgages. Look at the ads for furniture companies, ebay, cleaning products, featuring couples moving into flats and houses together, finding a way to make home life work for them both. In convincing us that home dwelling is the same thing as romantic partnership, and that you’re either in a couple or all alone with nothing in between, the twin forces of heteropatriarchy and capitalism have really done a number on us.

There has, though, been an increase in portrayals and discussions of 'different kinds of love' in mainstream media. There are films and books that treat platonic, rather than romantic, relationships as the focus of interest, public figures seeking to valorise ways of loving that exist outside the couple. On Valentine’s Day social media was crammed with posts celebrating the abundance of different ways of loving in the world. It seems like there might be a kind of consensus slowly building that romance and the couple should not define our understanding of love and companionship, and this is good! I’ve not yet read Shon Faye’s new book Love In Exile but in a clip of a Novara interview last week I watched her talk about the heavy and unrealistic burden we place on romantic relationships to fulfil practically all of our needs.