How Capitalism Learned to Sell Us Love

And here begins the more dangerous story: when capitalism fell in love.

Every time you see a diamond ring ad telling you its value is that it “proves your love,” or a perfume ad convincing you a tiny bottle will make you more attractive, or a film ending with a kiss in the rain as if every problem in life just resolved itself — remember, you’re not watching an innocent story. You’re watching an idea repeated thousands of times until it turns into truth inside your mind.

Eva Illouz and the Business of Love

That’s exactly what sociologist Eva Illouz — one of the most important researchers studying the relationship between love and capitalism — tried to explain, especially in her books Consuming the Romantic Utopia and Why Love Hurts. She said that in the modern era, love stopped being simply a feeling between two people — it entered the market. It became a product for sale, a massive industry driven by film studios, advertising, tourism, fashion, jewelry, even dating apps.

The point here isn’t that companies invented love — it’s that they discovered love is the single most powerful feeling that can make a person spend money without doing the math. Suddenly there’s a “holiday for love,” and it requires a gift, a specific restaurant, a trip, a ring, a photoshoot, posting the photos, making sure everyone knows you’re happy. Love itself sometimes gets measured by the size of the receipt.

The Image Cinema Sold Us

But the most dangerous thing was never the flowers or the rings. The most dangerous thing was the image.

Cinema played an undeniable role — from early Hollywood films through romance novels, all the way to Arab, Turkish, and Korean series, one single image of love got planted in our minds: one person, their other half, a lost soul searching for its match, someone who’ll understand you without words, someone who’ll heal your childhood wounds, someone who’ll make you happy for life — and if you don’t find them, your life is incomplete. The problem is this image is beautiful, but it rarely resembles reality, because a real human being wakes up with a headache, argues, gets tired, makes mistakes, keeps making mistakes, changes, grows older. But movies usually end right when the hard part begins… they end at the first kiss, while real life starts right after it. And if you look at most romantic films, you’ll find the entire conflict aims at just one thing: getting the couple together. But the harder question — how will they live together for twenty years — the film usually never answers.

And because humans love imitating stories, they started measuring their lives against them. A now-famous term appeared in psychology: unrealistic romantic expectations.

The diamond ring is the cleanest case study, because its status as proof of love has a documented birthday. Before the 1930s, a diamond engagement ring was a minor custom at best; the idea that a diamond specifically, rather than any other stone or gift, signified serious commitment was manufactured by the De Beers cartel and its ad agency N.W. Ayer, whose 1947 line “A Diamond Is Forever” turned a stone with almost no resale value into the one gift a proposal supposedly couldn’t do without. Illouz’s point isn’t that people who buy rings are being foolish. It’s that an entire emotional vocabulary, what counts as a real proposal, got retrofitted around a product a company needed to move.

Valentine’s Day follows the same arc on a smaller scale. Mass-produced greeting cards took off once printing got cheap enough in the mid-1800s, and the British chocolate maker Richard Cadbury is credited with selling one of the first heart-shaped boxes of chocolates for the occasion in 1868, giving the holiday a product to sell alongside the sentiment. None of that required love to change. It only required someone to notice that a date already associated with affection could be attached to something purchasable, then repeated year after year until skipping the purchase started to feel like skipping the feeling itself.

It would be too easy, though, to treat every ritual the market attached itself to as pure manipulation. Anthropologists have long argued that gifts and ceremonies do real social work regardless of who profits from them, cementing a public commitment in a way a private, unwitnessed promise doesn’t. Psychologist John Gottman’s decades of research on long-married couples found something closer to the opposite of the cinematic story: durable relationships aren’t the ones with the most dramatic declarations, but the ones built on small, repeated bids for attention, a glance acknowledged, a comment answered, accumulated over years rather than spent in one grand gesture. The ring and the wedding aren’t the lie. The lie is mistaking them for the whole relationship rather than its opening scene.

That’s the more useful way to hold Illouz’s argument, short of throwing out every bouquet and engagement photo as false consciousness. The market didn’t invent the desire to mark love with something visible and shared. It just learned to sell the marker as if it were the substance, and a culture raised on that substitution keeps mistaking the receipt for the relationship.