Columns

PURE RELATIONSHIPS

by Gerry McCarthy

Last month The Toronto Star ran an interview with actress Jodie Foster. She was at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting her new film Flightplan.

     The interview was interesting because of Foster's candor. For example: She explained that to be famous is to be constantly aware of a skewed imbalance in all your relationships. Everyone you meet knows you and has fixed ideas about you. But all you know of them is what they tell you. Encounters feel mediated and all exchanges are transactions. "You never know if you have a pure relationship with anyone you meet," she added.

     It was Foster's description of exchanges as "transactions" that interested me. Although she is speaking about the perils of being a celebrity --it prompted me to think about a wider problem in our culture.

     Recent studies indicate that levels of trust have fallen drastically in North America and Britain over the past 40 years. We also know that 50 per cent of marriages in North America end in divorce today. Both statistics are startling. But what are they telling us? Numerous analyses are possible. But our manic consumer culture might provide some answers.

     In a fascinating review of a new book entitled Undressing Infidelity: Why More Wives are Unfaithful by Diane Shader Smith in the July/August issue of The Atlantic magazine, Cristina Nehring writes that spouses often feel like "co-managers" of a home business. "As such they are part of the same unsentimental consumer culture that defines our relationships to, say, submarine sandwiches or coffee drinks," she says.

     In the same review, Nehring explains that: "The explosion of Internet dating in which you announce the traits you want in a lover as you'd announce the ingredients you want in a latte, and remorselessly exchange him if he's not made to specifications, has hastened still further the commodification of romance --and its desanctification."

     Critiques of our consumer culture are not new. But I'm convinced we don't spend enough time considering the consequences of the commodification of relationships.

     In her book The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work, Arlie Russell Hochschild raises some important (but gut-wrenching) questions on how the consumer culture affects our understanding of emotions and relationships. One example. She asks: "Can we speak of new emotional investment strategies? Do people think of emotion as that which they invest or divest so that self is ever more lightly connected to feeling? Does emotion itself take on the properties of capital?"

     Importantly, Hochschild writes that: "Through how it makes us see relations, define experience, and manage feeling, the culture of capitalism insinuates its way into the very core of our being."

     In the late 1970s, I remember reading Your Erroneous Zones by Wayne Dyer. Looking back I'm struck at how astonishingly frequent the term "self" was used by the author. It was if "self worth" had been elevated to that of a sacrament.

     The commodification of relationships and the worship of self are perfect companions. But how far are we going to go with self-realization, self-actualization, and self-empowerment? At what point does it begin to impede our ability to have life-giving, pure relationships?

     Last spring I had a conversation with the author and theologian Eugene Peterson. He maintains that we've now reduced the soul to self --and says people now approach marriage as "an act of self-fulfillment."

     Peterson says the reduction of soul to self is dangerous, because soul is the most personal term we have for who we are. "The term 'soul' is an assertion of wholeness, the totality of what it means to be a human being," he says. "'Soul' is a barrier against reductionism, human life reduced to biology and genitals, culture and utility, race and ethnicity. It signals an interiority that permeates all exteriority."

     The commodification of romance, love, and relationships is a subject that's enormously important, but sometimes depressing. That's because no one is immune from the culture. It's frighteningly easy to fall into the trap of speaking the language of the market in moments of intimacy. Before we realize it --we're measuring, evaluating, and "short-listing" where relationships and romance fit into lives and whether we should "divest."

     The inability to have pure relationships isn't just a problem for celebrities like Jodie Foster. If we follow the dictates of the consumer culture too closely --our own relationships can be tainted.

     St. Paul wrote about learning to be "content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty." This is the gift of faith, and it can liberate us from the prison of the consumer culture.

     To be content with little is a heresy in our society. We must want more, desire more, and need more --and find our summit in the perfect body, house, and career move.

     But when we live our Christian faith --our feelings of love and friendship for others can't be co-opted by the culture of the purchase. They are pure.

     It's a love that should be at our very core --because it's a love that's forever hopeful and transformative.

Gerry McCarthy is Editor of The Social Edge.