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Love, Inc. Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter

Online ISBN:
9780520967922
Print ISBN:
9780520295018
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Love, Inc. Dating Apps, the Big White Wedding, and Chasing the Happily Neverafter

Laurie Essig
Laurie Essig
Middlebury College
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Published online:
23 May 2019
Published in print:
12 February 2019
Online ISBN:
9780520967922
Print ISBN:
9780520295018
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

In Love, Inc., Laurie Essig argues that love is not all we need. As the future became less secure—with global climate change and the transfer of wealth to the few—Americans became more romantic. Romance is not just what lovers do but also what lovers learn through ideology. As an ideology, romance allowed us to privatize our futures, to imagine ourselves as safe and secure tomorrow if only we could find our "one true love" today. But the fairy dust of romance blinded us to what we really need: global movements and structural changes. By traveling through dating apps and spectacular engagements, white weddings and Disney honeymoons, Essig shows us how romance was sold to us and why we bought it. Love, Inc. seduced so many of us into a false sense of security, but it also, paradoxically, gives us hope in hopeless times. This book explores the struggle between our inner cynics and our inner romantic.

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