Looking for love in all the wrong places?

Some things cannot be bought, and love, especially, hides when it is sought.

UPDATE: Ann and I just did a live-broadcasted recording of our podcast What’s Right? on the topic of love and #MeToo hoaxes. It was a lot of fun and because it was the same day as the publication of this post I’ll share that here;

Looking for love in all the wrong places?

“What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.” - Haddaway

“I was lookin' for love in all the wrong places
Lookin' for love in too many faces” - Johnny Lee

Happy Valentine’s Day!

While my Valentine sleeps in, I thought, Why not write up a short post sharing something we like to say about finding love?

Ann Snelgrove-McKerracher

and I have been in love now for over six years. Married for almost two.

Over those last two years we co-taught a course and a couple of seminars on the topic of Critical Media Theory (CMT) — I’ll share a playlist of those lectures on the other side of the paywall as a perk for our noble patrons of the arts.¹

In the above photo from our wedding, you can see we are outdoors and have on hiking sandals (chacos, to be precise). That’s because we had a camping wedding. We wanted everyone to leave their normal habitats and join us in a place without cellphone service.

Not only was it an amazing weekend filled with love and less stress than any wedding ever, but people were present in a way that they would not have been for a normal wedding. We frequently get messages from people about how fondly they reflect on that weekend.

Well, that weekend was, in part, the culmination of our Critical Media Theory conversations over the last several years. We apply CMT to our lives and relationships every day.

It is not enough to rage against the culture of distraction. It is not enough to feel guilty about too much time spent doomscrolling reels on TikTok or Instagram or whatever it is you do. The point of theory is coordinated action.

We do experiments and develop strategies. We harness and counter tendencies of the medium. We do so in an attempt to reclaim solitude, genuine being with oneself, and solicitude, genuine being with others.

I’ll conclude this piece with Ann’s advice she likes to give people who are down in the dumps because they’ve been searching for love in all the wrong places. She shared that advice again yesterday in my classroom.

I’m teaching an Introduction to Sociology class at the local university. Because I’m not trying to make a career in academia, and teaching this is a one-off thing before I move in a couple of months, I feel free—freed to do as I please!

That does not mean we just eat popcorn and watch movies. It means we’ve done some experimental stuff, like this livestream of Why Left? with

Benjamin Studebaker

, which was broadcast and recorded for my IRL classroom + the YouTube livestream. (Mixing audiences, especially IRL and online, is what the AGORA experiments of the next couple of months are really all about!)

Thanks to Boise's poor transportation infrastructure that is not currently up to the challenge of a predictable snowstorm, classes were either cancelled or done virtually. So we did our first Zoom call as a class—meaning my students got to see me in my natural habitat.

It was a special session for a few reasons, chief among which was Ann’s presence.

She joined to see a presentation from some people she knew, but they cancelled due to the storm, so instead she stuck around and participated in the conversation.

Aware that I need to make what would otherwise remain merely abstract concepts more concrete for my students, I related some of the big ideas from class to love.

On looking for love

What IS society? Is it just the sum total of individuals within a region, or do those individuals have to have a common object? If so, is that common object trade, or The Good, or something else? These are some of the questions we have been asking.

Going with Durkheim, the social is greater than the sum of its parts. Individuals are fish in the river of the social. That means that there are factors beyond us that nevertheless shape us.

Our horizon of possibilities is framed by where we find ourselves thrown into the relations of production. Our role in those relations, our function in the mode of production, shapes everything. How we make sense of our place, horizon, and trajectory is through narratives and images that mediate our relations.

The new technologies that mediate experience are the environment. Giant tech companies socially engineer us every day. And now love, truth, and beauty are commodities we search for on the shelves of our friction-free phones.

Society has its own gravitational force. If the social is a river, then what way is it flowing? If you are tired of doomscrolling and superficial connections with others, then you have likely become aware that society’s flow is taking you into a toxic whirlpool.

We call that The Vicious Cycle. The Vicious Cycle is a Positive Feedback Loop that forms between non-committal curiosity, idle chatter, and ambiguity. Kierkegaard first observed this in his piece on The Public—and then Heidegger builds Being and Time around this realization.

At some point in our lives, usually between the age of twelve and thirty-five, we seek to get more serious about life. At that point you will realize you are surrounded by people who are less serious. We are accustomed to projecting the possibilities others have taught us to pursue, but are they are own?

Consumer choices are not the same as the choices we make once activated. Most of the choices most people are making most of the time are choices imposed on individualist tourists.

I asked my class for words they associate with “tourist” and they listed off: Passive, sticks out, superficial, unaware, entitled, disrespectful, invaders, and orientalism. Individualist has connotations like self-centered, narcissistic, and isolated. I think the word “passive” is especially important here.

Job-centric societies want you to only choose challenges within the workplace—outside of work, you are to be a tourist. Never mind passion-driven projects that have nothing to do with profit, jobs, or consumer hobbies.

To find ourselves in the riptides of The Vicious Cycle, between non-committal curiosity and ambiguous idle chatter, means that we find ourselves in a world built to reduce us all to habitual tourism.

We realize people like to drop their takes on things, but they don’t like to get to the bottom of anything. People speak in ambiguous ways with no commitment to getting to the roots of whatever it is that catches their wandering eyes.

But is that the end of it? Are we doomed to spiral forever going nowhere? Of course not. The Vicious Cycle is a springboard to higher possibilities. Skipping a lot of steps to keep this article short, The Vicious Cycle is what happens when The Virtuous Circle breaks down.

The Virtuous Circle is how solitude and solicitude build off each other. (This is not from Being and Time or Kierkegaard or anyone but is an idea I developed in a piece originally published in Stance, republished in my first book Waypoint, chapter 2.)

“Language ... has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” – Paul Tillich

Solitude, as genuine being with oneself, is the opposite of feeling isolated and bored, anxious, and depressed when alone. Its fullness is an achievement only reached after some difficulty coming to terms with one’s existence.

“Solitude reinforces a secure sense of self, and with that, the capacity for empathy.” Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation.

Solicitude, as genuine being with others, is the opposite of feeling alone in a crowded room. It involves real dialogue with concrete others as opposed to the performances we otherwise do for our big Others. Solicitude is also an achievement only reached after some difficulty, but that is because its actualization is dependent on solitude.

Solitude and solicitude are mutually reinforcing.

When alone undistracted you get to know yourself in a space of sober reflection. In this space we develop imagination, creativity, and empathy. These lead to forming a strong sense of what we have to offer, and a secure sense of self.

It’s one thing to tell boys to “just be yourself” and everything with love will work out. Saying “just act confident” though isn’t going to cut it. Acting confident is faking it, whereas being confident because you know who you are and what you have to offer, that’s what feeds solicitude.

Instead, people “choose a side” and identify as either introverted or extroverted. There is not “side” here, you need both to live the good life.

A culture of distraction in a world where everything we do is mediated through the attention economy means that we have new challenges pulling us away from solitude. Instead of finding ourselves, we are sold ourselves. Instead of finding others, we are sold others.

That’s the necessary theoretical background for sharing my wife’s advice on how to find love. She shared the advice yesterday in the session of my class that I am sharing on the other side of the paywall, but I’ll share the crucial part from the transcript here:

the advice that no one who feels [lonely on Valentine’s Day] wants to ever hear, but it's the advice that I think is the best, is Don't try so hard and don't be desperate. Do you. Make yourself interesting! Go out, do the things that you want to do, and you're going to meet cool people. Tinder and the dating apps might be a good place, probably some of you have met your former partners or current partners on dating apps—it's a cool way to meet people but that's not someone you meet in an organization where you share a real interest. I think just general advice in whether you're looking for friends, mentors, partners, any relationship, is don't be desperate, work on yourself, and you're bound to meet other cool people. That's how I met Dave! I wasn't out hunting for love. I just found this cool club on campus and we met and the rest is history. We've been married for almost two years! [Students make “awww” faces or clap] Not only is that going to make you better and feel more fulfilled because you have this outlet but it's just literally how you're going to meet cool people who are not obsessed with being on their phones. Or even if they are, at least they have a social life outside of the internet—real life with real energy, where you get to meet people and build yourself and build skills and have fun!

In other words, there is no “right place” to look for love. Stop looking.

Some things cannot be bought, and love, especially, hides when it is sought.

Work on yourself and build real confidence on the basis of finding meaning outside of yourself or lame tourist activities. Then you will, like Rilke said about living in the question, “live your way into the answer.”

Let love find you.

Thank you for reading.

The video of yesterday’s class session is available on the other side of this paywall as a special bonus for our amazing subscribers.² Thanks for supporting the arts and education! If you found this piece stimulating I think you will really appreciate some of the other goodies woven through the session. Enjoy!