Love Language
Love Language
A Mad Woman series on what we talk about when we talk about love, marriage, dating, heterosexuality, romance, and the family
Hi friends. Given the pace of the news cycle recently, I’ve been thinking about a way to connect with you all in the coming months that isn’t solely based on hot takes of political sound bites. I trust you are getting enough of that elsewhere! And it can at times be good, important work. But I’m a slow thinker, and being timely stresses me out.
Luckily, for better and for worse, election season coincidences with dating show season. So we are trying something new: a week-long series I’m calling Love Language. Each day next week, starting tomorrow, you’ll get a short piece by me in your inbox, exploring one popular romance cliche— the kind you are likely to hear on your favorite reality TV love contest series, from “putting up walls” to “broken families.”
Then, I’ll open up the comments to paid subscribers to talk through the wider ramifications of the language of love and consider how it connects to desire, monogamy, marriage, dating, heterosexuality, politics, and the family today.
I have written about the language that shows up on dating shows before (see below), but I thought now would be a good time for us to survey, together, the landscape of partnered love, which goes hand in hand with the myths and ideas we carry about gender and the nuclear family. We’ll dig into the familiar and frequently grating phrases that come up repeatedly on these shows to both release ourselves from them and explore what cultural and personal longings are embedded in them— as well as how the language of love speaks to and from many battles we see playing out now politically.
It all feels pretty timely after all, no?
Regular Mad Woman Readers: This series will arrive in your inbox every morning this week. If it’s not your thing, don’t worry, we’ll be back to regular Mad Woman programming next week.
If you’re not yet a Mad Woman subscriber, but you want to make sure you don’t miss this series, just sign up below. We have almost 14k followers here— but you don’t all subscribe yet. Maybe you’re “falling” but you’re “not sure you can get there”? Well, here I am asking you to commit! I really think we have a “strong connection”! I “see a future”!
Daily essays in the series will be free for all subscribers.
Conversation threads will be for paying subscribers only, so be sure to upgrade to paid if you want to unpack and discuss with us.
Please leave your favorite/most-hated love cliches below. I will pull a few for us to talk about more closely.
On Friday, we’ll also have a thread for paid subscribers to talk through any romantic ideas and phrases I missed.
In anticipation of this series, you can also check out some of the writing I’ve done before on this subject:
See you tomorrow to talk about “opening yourself up” and “putting yourself out there”!
I don’t think you can talk about relationship cliches without talking about soulmates, a mythology that, for all it has been adopted by people of all sexual orientations and genders, arose solely out of patriarchal cultures to serve the patriarchy. Also, it makes me want to stab someone in the eye.
I’ve had more than one man tell me that he had to end things/cheat because we just didn’t have that soulmate connection. But he wasn’t an emotionally withholding, duplicitous asshole or a romantic capitalist always looking for the next shiny thing. He was a spiritual seeker, a romantic. A warrior for love.
And there’s always another woman ready to accept their fickle and infantile attention because her ego is stroked by being deemed The One. As if giving your sense of self-worth away to some dude is the most romantic gift anyone can imagine.
It’s all just so gross.
I
"Being here for the right reasons."
"I want someone who just gets me."