So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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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 man, whose neighbors routinely hired birthday party planners to stage their children’s parties, clung defiantly to the idea of not hiring one for his daughter’s upcoming fifth birthday, and of instead planning it himself. He could afford to hire a service, but why do it? It was a powerful symbol, so he felt, of his attachment to his daughter and to the idea of himself as a “hands-on dad.”
A third person drew the line on emotional detachment in the simple act of buying a gift for a colleague’s new baby:
The wife of a colleague had just given birth to a new baby. They had set up a gift registry at Babies “R” Us, so I went to my computer and clicked on the registry. There were about a dozen choices. I didn’t want to pick the most expensive, since I don’t know the couple that well. But I didn’t want to be cheap, so I didn’t choose the least expensive thing either. I aimed for something in the middle, gave my Visa details, and that was that. But then I felt strange. I hadn’t visited the baby. I hadn’t gotten in the car. I hadn’t looked over toys or baby clothing. I hadn’t wrapped the gift or written the card. I didn’t deliver the gift. I hadn’t even called to congratulate them on the birth! A month later I couldn’t remember what the gift was, only how much it cost. So I bought some little plastic measuring spoons, got in the car, and paid the family a visit.
If she could not even remember what she had given, this woman wondered, had she really given a gift at all? For a warm-hearted person, that felt too cold. So she did things—bought the plastic spoons, paid a visit—to express the degree of warmth that seemed right to her. She sensed that she had been too detached from the colleague, the mother, the baby, and the very idea of herself as a loving person. So she made up for it.
People also guarded against over-attachment. One kindly woman who was coping with both a husband and son in ill health drew the line at taking on an ill niece. “I’m a show-up person,” she declared, “but I can’t worry about Lily now. I have to watch that I don’t over-extend.” She had overextended herself in the past:
I was helping so many people,