>>835064i agreed with the general idea of your argument about the commodification of romance, i just thought it was funny that you felt the need to use quotes to intellectually distance yourself from the word love.
i do think however that the commodification of love is not unique to capitalism and love was plenty commodified under feudalism, perhaps even moreso than under modern capitalism. people critical of their current era tend to have a rose-tinted view of ancient history and see it as a simpler and more honest time, especially communists who tend to act as if all of the world's injustice and inequity began with capitalism.
the human need and capacity for romance is innate to our biology and thus cannot change to any significant extent within the historical timeframe of only a few centuries. and the social dynamics surrounding romance have not actually changed that much, if anything sham marriages and performed love were even more prevalent in the pre-capitalist era due to the total absence of female autonomy, the certainty of a lifetime of shame and alienation and hard labor for young girls who did not find a husband asap, forced marriages, couples getting married and having children at a very young age, society's indifference to spousal abuse and extreme stigma towards divorce and adultery, etc.
plenty of pre-capitalist commoners were in shitty unhappy marriages and they had to justify the marriage to themselves and to their kids and their peers and their god somehow, and so they bullshitted themselves and the people around them into thinking they loved the person when they really didn't, just as people do today. if not for that delusion spouses would have been divorcing or running off or murdering each other or hanging themselves left and right, nobody can share a bed with someone they despise for years without bullshitting themselves to preserve some tiny sliver of sanity.
the real absurdity is just the fact that this kind of delusional thinking about romance is still so prevalent in neoliberal democracies in the modern era, where women are granted enough autonomy to live independently and divorce is no longer a terrible shame that gets you shunned for life and forced marriages are (nominally) illegal and church and state are (nominally) separate and the puritanical christian tradition is not nearly the ubiquitous cultural force it once was, yet inertia somehow keep these attitudes going generation after generation, and i think that's where capitalism really comes into play.
myopia is perhaps the most defining feature of capitalism in my opinion, the inability to look ahead. the wealthy capitalist elite are permanently out of touch with the cultural zeitgeist due to their extreme wealth, which is why they have to spend trillions of dollars on market research just to figure out if people still like ketchup on their french fries or not, they have to look at statistical data from the past to figure out how to extort people in the present, and the older and more long-running patterns are the safest bets; it's very risky to take a chance on trying to profit from a more recent pattern (as bud light recently learned), it's safer to cater to the sensibilities of the past and therefore capitalists have much incentive to do everything in their power to impede cultural evolution and motivate people to stay in the past and stay in their old ways of thinking, the ones that they know how to monetize effectively and predictably. and this isn't really unique to capitalism either, it's just authoritarianism in general that operates this way, if you want to control and extort people you have to understand people and people who change with the passage of time are much harder to understand.