Was marriage ever about feelings? Credits: Debrocke/ClassicStock, via Getty Images
When Taylor Swift released The Life of a Showgirl, some of her online feminist fans went into meltdown, because this new installment in her history of having boyfriends is a sort of End of History. Or perhaps End of Boyfriends. Taylor is so terminally, ecstatically in love with fiancé Travis Kelce, that she’s going to marry him. For these feminist fans, such an open celebration of romantic love and traditional or at least monogamous marriage is reactionary, regressive, an offense against the sisterhood.
It’s hard to know how widely held this attitude is, even among feminists. But suspicion of romance and marriage, however niche or pathological it is on social media, has a respectable analog in academic literature, where daring thinkers conceive of people as always maximizing their utility — and where “utility” doesn’t mean something vague like “happiness”. It just means money.
This, elite feminism argues, is the right mindset for women’s liberation. And a recent article in New York Times Magazine celebrates the growing cultural presence of the “gold digger” – the woman who unashamedly marries for money instead of love. The article’s author, Amy X. Wang, points out the gold-digger’s growing prominence in prestige television, writing that “shades of [the gold digger] exist in all the desultory characters of The White Lotus and Succession complaining of irksome husbands while winking from behind Chanel sunglasses”.
But Wang misunderstands that these women are actually cautionary figures, trapped and tragically deflated, both cringing at the dehumanizing deal they’ve made with the god of money. They might make you wonder why a writer for the prestigious New York Times Magazine would present them as conquering schemers. But this gold-digger essay fits neatly within a more general approach, nominally feminist, to describing and analyzing domestic and romantic relationships.
A prominent cadre of progressive and feminist writers have embraced a conspicuously economic paradigm for understanding the most intimate human dealings. In their portraits of marriage, romance, and parenthood, these writers methodically replace the language of love and commitment with that of exchange and labor, the market and the workplace. It’s an act of women’s liberation, apparently, to view love itself as a cage of patriarchy, to treat tender feelings as unrealistic and reactionary, to believe that a husband and wife and their children are most truly bound together by dry calculation, the abstract ligature Marx called “the cash nexus”.
With this reductive mentality as the deep grammar of love-talk and family-talk on the Left, you can see why progressives are now starting families and having children at much lower rates than are conservatives. Among the other misgivings towards marriage and childbearing they might have, progressive women have apparently decided that, as a lifestyle proposition, these tender and intimate things are just too much of a drag on career achievement. They just cut too much into what really has value: lifetime profitability.
Today the publishing world offers us a continuing glut of divorce memoirs, in which women seeking personal fulfillment free themselves into self-sufficient individuality from the dullness and compromise of life lived as a shared project. This culture has likewise renamed prostitution as “sex work” and revalued it as creditable employment because doesn’t this just acknowledge that romance and marriage are matters of power and money anyway? Another telling symptom of this broader outlook is the expanding use of the phrase “emotional labor” to name the aspects of being in a relationship that aren’t all fun and games.
Ironically, this phrase came to its current prominence through a sort of eager misappropriation that is revealing in its own right. “Emotional labor” was originally coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, most prominently in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart, as the basis of a complex and prescient analysis of the workplace. Hochschild observed how employers were requiring greater measures of emotional control and performance from their employees, especially those in traditionally female jobs such as nurses and flight attendants. In Hochschild’s handling, “emotional labor” applied entirely to the workplace and had nothing to do with the intimate spheres of family and romance. But, for the politics of victimhood and petty complaining gaining force throughout the 2010s, and for the increasingly cynical and misandrous feminism growing prominent over that decade, the phrase “emotional labor” had such perfect resonance that seizing it for misuse was irresistible, if not obligatory.
It was onto this fertile politico-linguistic soil that a new term was cast like a plump seed by Stanford-based psychologist Angelica Ferrera. Over the past year, Ferrara has achieved rare fame, for an academic researcher not yet in her first full-time teaching position, thanks to the viral uptake of a paper she published in 2024 in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinities — “Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality”. Of course, it wasn’t the paper that went viral. It was the word, “mankeeping”, which rang perfectly with the miserly tone of neoliberal book-balancing already ambient in progressive discourse on intimate relationships, and which finally made it into the mainstream this August when The New York Times featured its own article on mankeeping.
Ferrara’s argument is fairly straightforward, and in the basic outline of its empirical claims it is reasonably persuasive. As men’s networks of friends and acquaintances have grown smaller and thinner, Ferrara says, they have begun to rely increasingly, and often exclusively, on their wives, girlfriends, and platonic female friends for social connection and emotional support. For these women, sitting and listening to their socially disconnected male friends and lovers express their personal problems and psychological struggles, while also tending the social lives of these hapless men, is a form of emotional labor.
One obvious problem with this analysis is that it’s historically incurious. It offers no discussion about possible changes in the culture and psychology of men over the time in which their friendship networks dried up and mankeeping became a problem for women. One key claim in this line of argument is that men don’t do their emotional sharing with other men because they think it makes them look weak or gay. But this claim sits oddly in any comparative historical understanding of the matter. It’s hard to imagine that a fear of appearing gay is somehow stronger now than it was 30 or 50 years ago. The most plausible alternative explanation complicates the story that Ferrara’s research is being used to tell.
That is, it may be that today’s men not only have fewer friends but are just different from how men used to be. Products of a culture suffused with the tropes and norms and expressive requirements of psychotherapy, they may simply have a different relationship with their emotions than men used to have: a greater awareness of them, a higher estimation of their importance, and thus a more urgent need to express them. Back in the Fifties, perhaps men didn’t have the same emotions to express, or the same access to those emotions, or the same belief that such expression was necessary for their “mental health” — a phrase that, beyond a certain point in the fairly recent past, a man may have gone his entire life without ever hearing.
It may be that — I think it’s likely that — men are different now. Encouraged by the women in their lives, and by the omnipresent messaging apparatus of psychotherapy, to be more attuned to their inner feelings than were those prehistoric cavemen of earlier decades, they have begun to do what these authorities of emotional life were exhorting them to do. They’ve agreed to become the sorts of people who talk about their feelings, and the people who were telling them to do this are now telling them to please shut up because the patriarchy of this emotional sharing is giving me an injustice headache.
But the more fundamental problem with the lessons being derived from the mankeeping meme is the reductive economic understanding of intimate relations that informs it, and that it propagates. Very quickly and unreflectively, Ferrara and those parroting her scholarly meme lapse into the language of “emotional labor”. But, within this formulation, the word “labor” is smuggling truckloads of unacknowledged political meaning. If the efforts of emotional and social support that women undertake in relationships really are labor, in other words, then it’s much easier to view the relationships themselves — indeed intimate relationships in general — as retrograde and expendable, not worth the effort.
The subtly invidious political sense conveyed by “labor” is perhaps best grasped with reference to the distinction Hannah Arendt draws in The Human Condition. For Arendt, “labor” lies much closer than “work” to mere material survival. One “labors” to secure the means for reproducing physical life. Labor is thus something we share with animals, who also expend effort to secure their physical survival. “Work”, on the other hand, is conscious effort directed at some meaningful end or goal. Indeed, we often call such an end or goal a work. The distinction between “labor” and “work” here is important in this discussion, in that it’s one area where Arendt was heavily influenced by Marx, and where Marx had something meaningful and even profound to say about human life. It’s important as well because the Marxian lexicon of “labor” and “exploitation” was often taken up by feminist theorists describing domestic relations, and because this lexicon of feminist critique still influences how gender relations are written about today.
I’m not an expert in the history of feminist theory, but I imagine that, back in the Sixties and Seventies, the use of “labour” to describe the work women do in the domestic sphere was a self-conscious one, a knowing invocation of Marx’s class analysis, its polemical edge thus intentional. I’d guess it was evocative and effective at the time, but it was also overwrought, a bit of militant melodrama that brought collateral costs we’re still paying — now that the victims in the political struggle are not jobless wives with lower legal standing but white-collar women oppressed, somehow, by their sad needy boyfriends who can’t make plans.
Using the starker theoretical terms of Marxian class conflict in order to highlight the political stakes in domestic relations might seem like academic sophistication and political realism, but doing this effectively re-describes those relations in a way that mocks or nullifies the deeper human meaning we might want to find in them. The work of mothers and wives is “labour”, which means the domestic sphere is a space of material production and economic exploitation much like a factory. At a certain point in the habitual use of “emotional labor” to name what happens in the intimate sphere, the loving aspect of relations between women and men, and women and children, ceases to have even aspirational meaning. It’s all just an ideological con of the patriarchy. This is an unfortunate turn in the cultural history of sentiment. In our intensifying struggle to live human lives in the face of the deepening machine demands of employment and commerce and technology, the emptying-out of the ideals of romantic and familial love represents a huge loss.
This growing cynical mood towards romance and family has a historical component that likewise borrows, often unconsciously, from tendentious Marxian takes on family life. It’s long been held among progressive writers that the nuclear family, living separately from extended families and grounded in sentimental fondness between husbands and wives, is historically weird, an anomaly among human institutions that sprang up in the late 18th and early 19th centuries thanks to capitalism. In his great book The Subversive Family, Ferdinand Mount shows that this belief owes to the influence among Leftist writers of Friedrich Engels’s historically crude and empirically bogus The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
Amy X. Wang’s article on gold-diggers shows both the continuing influence of this received historical wisdom and its patent implausibility. “For most of its history,” Wang writes, “marriage in the Western world was never about feelings. It was about elite, landowning families joining their children together to strengthen their holdings. Husbands and wives were meant to be business partners.”
You’d think the bizarreness of this formulation — marriage in general was “about” how a small unrepresentative subset of the population practiced it — would be obvious to everyone besides the person who wrote it. This self-contradictory history, though, shows up all over the place in popular writing about domestic life: marriage was “never” about “feelings” until the capitalist bourgeoisie came along and wrenched family life from its universal basis in the mercenary ways of a small number of aristocrats.
In fact, as the late anthropologist Helen Fisher argued, an intense emotional attachment between parents is an evolutionary inheritance that serves the raising of children, and so such attachment almost certainly bound parents together from the very beginnings of human time. And as Mount shows, the historical model of marriage as an economic contract, unmotivated by romantic sentiment and arranged by parents of voiceless teenage brides and grooms, is more subverted than supported in European history. For example, the obscure pre-capitalist dramatist Shakespeare used the ideal of marrying for love as an anchor of dramatic sentiment in his comedies.
And it just goes without saying that, before capitalism, most people weren’t land-rich aristocrats engaged in a lethal game of thrones who used their marriageable children as pawns in this game. To confirm this obvious fact, Mount cites historian Lawrence Stone, whose research showed that the average age among commoners and small landholders could be as high as the late twenties in pre-modern marriages. Among other things, this meant that many people got married when their parents were dead and they were free to follow their own marital motives. It was not “never” but surely sometimes and perhaps quite often, well before capitalism is supposed to have invented the bourgeoisie that invented marital love, that couples married because they’d gotten to know each other on their own and were really fond of each other. At least, it happened often enough for Shakespeare to make a dramatic ideal of it, and to assume his audience carried this ideal in their own hearts.
Mount’s arguments are supported by Joseph Henrich’s powerful recent book The WEIRDest People in the World, which shows a model of “neolocal” household formation by newly married couples — marrying and forming nuclear families in new households rather than slotting into existing households run by bridal parents — applying in much of the history of Christian Europe. These arguments are also supported — and the idea that the love-marriage is a 19th-century quirk of the Euro-American middle class is undermined — by recent research showing that a desire to have romantic love in long-term relationships is almost universal in human societies.
None of this is to say that disenchantment with romance and family has nothing behind it. Women’s disquiet with feckless 21st-century men is totally understandable. It must be saddening and frustrating to bring the old aspiration for romantic coupling into adulthood only to find that most of your potential mates are emotional children. But the critical habits that mainstream writers now apply to this problem, always dubious on historical and analytical grounds, are also outdated. The humane redoubts of romance and family are already tottering under assault from powerful material forces, even without feminist writers using rote cynicism and bad history to discredit them to their impressionable audience — the ascendant class of female professionals dealing with this struggling class of male adults.
In this atmosphere, it’s all too easy to displace the gauzy discourses of love and marriage and raising children with the knowing language of “emotional labor”, cynical truisms about “gold digging” as a default condition in human history. It sounds academic and oppositional, as well as disabused and unromantic. It carries both the emancipatory flair of transgression and the arid power of skeptical reserve, the positivist’s cool dismissal of deeper things. That this attitude dominates progressive commentary on intimate life makes its own reductive, economic sense. After all, an ambitious writer doesn’t want to commit too many moral or sentimental resources in her depiction of romance and family. Her future career might include a divorce memoir.