BBC Three’s new programme The Year of Making Love, uses the influence of science in order to manipulate an experiment that seeks to create 500 couples. The show follows them throughout the course of a year, and observes whether the couples scientifically matched are successful. On watching this, Karl Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism springs to mind, and his belief that people no longer consider the process of how something is made, but merely connect it to money and exchange. He gives the example of a wooden table, and how when it is turned into a commodity, the hands of the labourer become detached and immaterial. One has to wonder whether it is truly progression to convert human relationships into an objectified scientific process. The years of courtly love have already been long decapitated, and with this generation of dating sites, one in five UK relationships now begin online and the industry is globally worth more than £2billion. Is this not just a reflection of our coach-potato society? Young and able bodies are signing up to find love, and my question is why? Some sites are proven to have purely sexual outcomes after encounters, and people become a mere profile rather than a real person. Love is revamped and shaped into an image rather than something real. It becomes associated with an idea rather than truth, and in the words of Baudrillard, the ‘image becomes more real than the real’.
Media culture manufactures a breakdown between reality and the imaginary, and human emotions are turned into a product. Shows like Take me Out, although providing us with some serious entertainment at the mere stupidity of most participants, turn love into a stereotypical surface based on, let’s face it, exterior appearances. This indoctrination by the media leaves people with a misrepresentation of how love is established.
Britain itself has the highest divorce rate in the EU, which ultimately acts as proof that people are marrying too hastily, with a lack of contemplation going into the process of spending a life together, all in order to obtain an artificial image of love and a completed life. Iconic celebrities like Britney Spears have become an embodiment of these artificial matrimonies, with her marriage to Jason Alexander that took place in Vegas, resulting in divorce after just 55 hours. Children already have the latest gadgets like the Ipad, with complete unawareness or concern about the processes that made them. The privileges of being a child are snatched away as less time is spent playing outdoors like previous generations, and more time is spent behind a screen of images. It won’t be long before they reach an age where they think divorce is inevitable because of their unawareness of what love is, due to its objectification by the media, and their obliviousness to the processes that need to take place for a relationship to blossom.
Similar icons like Made in Chelsea’s star Spencer Mathews, turn love into a commodity and completely deplete it’s intrinsic worth. His search for love on TV show The Bachelor, resulted in the birth of a new relationship to girlfriend Khloe Evans. However just days after the show had finished she was photographed kissing another reality TV star, Towie’s Tom Pearce. This again reiterates the disintegration of reality, as images refer to other images rather than to reality. Personal identity and relationships are turned into media consumption with economic benefits. They deteriorate into something fictional and hollow, based solely around monetary value.
People should be able to find partners without the scientific pairing of personality traits, which as seen on the programme The Year of Making Love, wasn’t always effective anyway. There is nothing wrong with people who after years of struggling to find love, opt to enrol onto a dating website. However much of it appears to be laziness and an easier way to pick people that seem acceptable to date. This is not progression. It is simply illusion.
By Melissa McDonald