and recognizes me? It made me squirm.” She had placed herself before strangers, some of whom could pose a terrible danger. People she knew could recognize her and disparage her as “desperate.” But Evan told her to plunge ahead. He was the pro, and she trusted him.
Once she began to correspond with potential suitors, Grace kept notes of how many responses she received daily. When she first got on Match.com she was 49 years old, and she was delighted to receive many responses. On her next birthday, she changed her online age to 50; to her horror, the responses plummeted. “It was like my stock price fell overnight. ‘What happened?’ I asked myself. ‘I’m the same person I was a day ago, but my ratings fell by half.’”
Ratings fall in face-to-face encounters, too, of course. Grace might have been braced against a dismissive glance from a man she had met at her sister-in-law’s party, but on Match.com Grace was in the “world’s largest love mall,” as Evan called it; the fall may have been more impersonal, but it was still hurtful. She needed to remain partially detached from any wishful fantasies she projected onto a string of e-mails from a suitor because he, too, was on the market. He might be lying about himself and declaring his undying love to five other women. Was she projecting? she had to ask herself. Evan told the followers of his Internet blog that they often took Internet dating rejections too personally, and they suffered accordingly. One woman, who described herself as “nice, average looking, intellectually fun and creative,” wrote, “I am SO SICK of these men who are fives (or lower) who think they’re going to wind up with supermodels.” She felt over-entitled men were passing her over, and that made her mad. But anger violated Evan’s feeling rule: be upbeat and mildly interested but basically detached.
So when was the coast clear to feel open hearted? Grace wondered. Evan said this:
People get very confused. They want to know when a relationship is serious. A relationship isn’t real until you have committed to being boyfriend or girlfriend. Everything prior to that—phoning, emailing, dating, preliminary sex—all that isn’t real until you have each committed. I’ve had clients devastated to realize that they’ve fallen in love with someone who is still looking online.
All of Evan’s lessons about what, when, and how much to feel gave Grace a kind of user’s guide to Internet dating, setting out new rules of emotional engagement. With the shrinking of what the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas calls “the life world” and the rise of the “system world” (which includes the market, state, technology, and media), people like Grace find themselves situated at the crossroads where the two meet—even as those spheres are themselves in flux.3 Increasingly, people ask themselves, Should I prepare for a purely market transaction and emotionally detach? Or am I among friends, family, or community, in which case I should prepare myself to feel emotionally attached? What mix of market and personal should I prepare for, and what measure of attachment?
Grace saw Match.com as a means to an end. Alarm bells went off when she realized that, in the case of two suitors, one after the other, the means—the application of a market way of thinking—got stuck to the end: love. Before she met the man to whom she is now happily committed, Grace had had half-year relationships with two other suitors. Each had ended the relationship because he could not get along with her pre-teen daughter who disliked them both. As each one ended his relationship with Grace, he made the same parting remark.
It was eerie. The first guy said, “I’m getting back on Match.com. It was so easy to find you, there must be others out there just like you.” He came back three months later saying, “Oh my God! What did I do? There’s no other you out there.” I told him, “It’s too late. I’m not dealing with someone who thinks people come in facsimiles.” It was very weird, but the second guy said exactly the same thing as he left, “It was so easy to find you. I’ll find another.”
Both of them saw her “like a box of cereal on the shelf,” she felt. “Just like me? What were they thinking?” It was as if one could exchange one “6” for any other “6.”
A market way of relating to others is brilliantly suited to the purchase of a washing machine, a cell phone, or a hat. The idea of a 1 to 10 rating, a brand, and an ROI—all of these ideas are a good fit with the act of buying such things. But how do they fit romantic love? Grace wondered. Evan offered a market way of thinking as a tool for temporary use in finding a romantic partner, not as an end in itself. But what if some people keep using this tool long after the task has been accomplished? What if they apply ROI, branding, and 1-to-10 thinking to love itself? That was the problem.
Grace didn’t want to get hurt but she didn’t want to become heartless. So how attached did she dare to feel to a given suitor? To Evan? To herself? As with other Americans today, Grace was moving in a world of increasingly specialized market services—themselves set within a larger cultural remix of market and personal life (see chapter 7). She was calling on rules governing precisely how much or how little to care.4 No one needed to care about a “6,” but Grace wanted an open-hearted man to care about her.
GOING ON “ATTACHMENT ALERT”
At the most primal level, emotional engagement is a matter of attachment and, as such, a matter of survival. As the University of Chicago experimental psychologist John Cacioppo and his coauthor William Patrick show in their book, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, human beings share with nonhuman species strong responses to isolation or rejection.5 According to their research, the more isolated people are, the less well they sleep, the higher their anxiety, the less well-functioning their immune system, and less well-regulated their glucocorticoid response. Isolated individuals show higher rates of sickness and, in older adults, higher rates of death. Not just isolation but loneliness creates a wear and tear on the body. Loneliness is as harmful to health, the authors report, as high blood pressure. It does twice as much harm to health as obesity and the same degree of harm as cigarette smoking. When Cacioppo hypnotized people once to feel lonely and once to feel among friends, big differences showed up in their physiological responses. When lonely, the subjects developed greater reactivity to stress and higher cortisol levels. And people are not the only ones: when isolated from others of their kind, Cacioppo reported, even fruit flies die sooner.6
Within families, small children exhibit different kinds of attachment to their primary caregivers, as the researcher John Bowlby argued based on his study of World War II war orphans. And, like children, adults express different styles of attachment in their search for love.7 But each style of attachment—say, the “anxious-preoccupied” or “dismissive-avoidant”—is not simply a state that we are inside or outside of. We continuously shape our attachments as we go along, sensing when we are “over-attached” or “under-attached.” Such sensings send a signal: “anxiety and fear coming up” or “no worries here.” If we become too detached, we fear sadness or depression. If we become too attached, we fear engulfment or loss of self. Our alarm system warns us to engage in some sort of restorative strategy in order to return to the degree of attachment to others that, as adults, we feel we need.8
For The Outsourced Self (2012), a book about clients’ and practitioners’ experiences of intimate services, I explored how people draw lines, at different moments and in different ways, between themselves and symbols of connection to others. It is as if people asked themselves, “Am I too detached from this symbol of connection to others? Or too attached?” Even apparently minor symbols of attachment seemed to matter. For example, one long-hours businessman hired a dog-walker to walk a beloved family dog on weekdays, but he raised his voice excitedly as he explained, “But not on Saturday or Sunday. If people go out and buy a dog and decide to care for it, I don’t see how they could hire someone to walk it on Saturday. After all, it’s their dog. Otherwise, why have a dog?” To him, walking the dog himself on Saturday, or seeing others do so, signaled attachment to the dog, and all the dog meant to him—a sense of home, belonging, warmth, devotion.
Another
