So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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when you look back after twenty years together, do you say, ‘We’ve been soul mates all along.’” So Evan invited Grace to reinterpret what she had once defined as “true love” as being “infatuation.”
Eager clients project onto their on-screen suitors all the wonderful attributes they so hope to find. So he cautioned Grace: “Keep a check on your dreamboat fantasies. Go slow. Don’t be too eager.” Grace might wishfully fantasize that the man she sipped wine with by the fire in her brother’s living room was “the one,” Evan counseled, but this would be a bigger problem when Grace clicked her way through hundreds of profiles of online strangers. Her hopes could be wildly unrealistic, he explained:
Women come into my office with long lists of characteristics they want: the man should be successful, tall, handsome, funny, kind, and family-oriented. Does he like to dance? Is he a film aficionado? A real reader? They want a charismatic guy who doesn’t flirt, a successful C.E.O. who’s home at 5:00 p.m. Some women price themselves out of the market, and they’re very touchy about not wanting to settle for less than the complete list that they believe promises a soul mate and chemistry. Then a lot of people get discouraged and conclude it’s impossible to find real love.
Grace could imagine she had experienced a magical moment shared with the man of her dreams, only to discover it was all an illusion. So she needed to work out new terms of emotional engagement. How emotionally attached to an on-screen man should she feel at that first exchange? On the first date? The second? The third? Evan advised her on how attached to let herself feel by comparing dating to work at a job. Dating as work? Okay, Grace said, “I’m an engineer, so it was easy for me to think of dating as work. Just get it done. I know that sounds un-romantic, but that’s okay so long as I get to my goal. Evan kept my nose to the grindstone.”
We usually think of meeting a person to go on a date—a hike, a picnic, a restaurant dinner, a play—as a voluntary and pleasurable act. Indeed, we imagine pleasure as the very purpose of it. To compare dating a potential partner to the tedious turn of a grindstone is to say, in effect, “Don’t expect this to be fun.”
Others writing on Evan’s online blog also approached dating as work: “I keep plugging away, TableForSix [a service that sets up dinners with other singles], poetry readings, volunteering, it’s hard work.” Others did not agree: “Looking for love is not like work,” one wrote defiantly. But Evan told Grace that dating was work—and that she should not resent it. Indeed, part of the emotion work Evan was asking Grace to do was to try feeling upbeat about the fact that dating was work:
When you’re unemployed, what do you do to find work? When you are single, what do you do to find love? I’m not telling clients to spend forty hours a week looking for love, but I tell them, “You can give it three. Do the numbers—and don’t resent it.”
Another way Evan prepared Grace for the online dating market was by asking her to think of herself as a brand:
The Internet is the world’s biggest love mall. To enter it, you have to brand yourself because you only have three seconds. When I help a client brand herself, I’m helping her put herself forward to catch that three-second glimpse, and I’m helping her footnote the rest. A profile could say, “I talk about myself a lot. I go through bouts of depression, and Zoloft usually works.” That might be the truth, but it’s not going into her brand.
Like an object for sale, Grace had a label, Evan explained, and it had to grab attention. About her online profile, he said, “Don’t hide behind generalities like ‘fun-loving’ and ‘musical.’ Bring out your real self. Put that into your brand.” At the same time, he felt it was important to set boundaries on this public “real self” in early e-mail conversations with men. When Grace suggested telling about a stint at a Buddhist monastery where she was asked to clean a bathroom with a toothbrush, Evan replied, “That’s a little out there.” Grace prepared to emotionally detach from possible responses to that “real Grace” and to put that real Grace out there. That was Evan’s counsel: be interested, of course, but stay detached.
Then there were numbers. As Evan explained, even if Grace did not think of herself as, say, a “6” on a 0 to 10 scale, numbers still applied to her. She should know about them because she was in a market and they reflected her market worth:
In the eyes of many men a “10” woman is 24 years old, never married, has a sexy 36-24-36 figure, Nicole Kidman face, warm personality, a successful but flexible career, and a love of gourmet cooking. As a “10” she would score the highest number of male responses on Match.com.
Grace was very pretty and sexy, but she was 49 years old, divorced, and had little time for gourmet cooking. So, Evan surmised, maybe she was a “6.” He added, “I see a lot of 5 men looking for 10 women, and that leaves the 4 and 5 women in the dust.” So Grace had to try to detach her feelings of hurt pride from “Grace-as-6.”
In all of this, Evan counseled Grace to think about her ROI—return on investment—of time, thought, and emotional involvement. If a man was not right for her, she needed to keep an eye on the clock and move on.
Dating as work, dating as branding, dating as becoming a 5 or 6 in the eyes of others, dating as calculating her ROI, this was the market perspective Evan invited Grace to adopt. It called on her capacity to detach feeling from the idea of herself as a brand and as an ROI collector as well as from any given suitor.
In a grocery store, certain tacit feeling rules apply while transacting business: be friendly and pleasant with the checkout clerk. In the time you have, you can talk about the weather, the Dodgers game, or the taste of a new pesto, but do not get deeply involved. The clerk is doing a job and so are you. If you care too much about the clerk, it hurts the transaction, becomes a problem, and makes you seem strange. The basic feeling rule governing market transactions is to stay fairly emotionally detached.
We cannot apply the cheerful detachment we feel for a checkout clerk to a lover, spouse, parent, or child, of course, without something being haywire. However ambivalently, to them we usually feel deeply attached. Between these two boundaries—one demarking “too much” feeling and the other “too little”—flow all our feelings as we encounter the situations of life.
After Grace had written her profile, posed for her photo, and written her subject line, she panicked. As she recounted, “It was hard to push the button. That was my photo, and there are 20,000,000 viewers who are going to see it. What if some creep downloads my photo? I work in a state office building. What if someone walks in 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