The Marketplace of the Heart

A friend wrote me telling me I should post a small piece on NAFTA and immigration and the economic repercussions of the latest debates on illegal aliens. She also mentioned I should write about the Phillips Curve (the inverse relationship between unemployment and rising inflation). I’ve sort of thought about it. I won’t admit I’ve thought about it a great deal. I have been otherwise preoccupied with matters less politic, more spiritual, certainly matters more nebulous and intangible.

My preoccupations are with love. What a boring and completely banal subject. So trite. So mundane. So pathetic. I am not in love. I am struggling with the notion of wanting to be in love. I am struggling with the thought of the vulnerability it requires and the recklessness that it demands. I am feeling too weak to try to fight for it. I feel to insecure to ask for it in return. And this is the subject I can’t get off my mind.

I want love to be as simple and straightforward as economics. What?! Economics aren’t straightforward and they certainly aren’t simple – but what economic theory does do is make an attempt to forecast an outcome based on the natural human response to a given stimulus in the market place. And really, although the outcome is usually surprising, there have been a number of instances where the marketplace has actually let scholars make predictions whose outcomes have been prescribed perfectly. The school of economic philosophy has allowed us to come up with indicators that narrow down the scope of behavior. People create the markets, people dictate the parameters of markets, people try to manipulate the market for their own profit. Markets are constantly driven by human nature. The quirk is that behavior isn’t necessarily logical and it isn’t necessarily easy to predict, but somehow, someway, analysts have been able to take the quixotic nature of human behavior in a particular arena and explain it – from the first rumor to the final result. Economics is a way to understand human nature and one of the most interesting deadly sins (greed – which interestingly enough is also called avarice, something close to "a vice").

So why can’t economics also explain one of the virtues? Why can’t it explain love? Why, damnit? Or maybe why can’t love be simple enough to be explained by an economic philosophy? Why isn’t it a question of finding the most satisfactory mix of qualities in a person (kindness, intelligence, compassion, curiosity, self-discipline) and then acquiring them as a partner, a logical thing to do in any marketplace. The first thing students are taught in an economic class is the concept of the right mixture of goods and services – or what we all choose to put in our basket. We have, for example, a limited amount of time to work, work earns us money, money buys goods and services. What we choose to purchase with our earnings is weighed against how long it will take us to earn that money. Our time spent working and our time spent in leisurely pursuits will determine the income we have to spend on goods and services…and of course what we ultimately choose to purchase will be determined on what sort of things we value most. (I have it boil down to what material goods are worth our daydreams and playtime, but that’s just me.)

So why can’t we apply the same sort of theory to our pursuit of love? Why is it impossible to explain why we reject certain people with certain characteristics who, if we were to rationally describe what we are looking for in a love-object, are simply not attractive options? Why is it also the case that people with the "wrong" mix of characteristics – people we would rationally reject – happen to be the ones to whom we are attracted the most? And worse, why are we continually drawn to the people who have tendencies to make us unhappy…and don’t give me some profound psycho-analytic explanation of a deep-seeded belief in ourselves that we are unworthy of love so we continue to care for people who only frustrate our desire to be loved
I want an explanation – a rational explanation – so that I can figure out how to better allocate my resources (my tastes, especially) so that I don’t end up frustrated with the people I chose to attract, be attracted to, and waste time obsessing over. I like my daydreams, and I’d love for them to be fulfilled…and sometimes the longing of a fantasy is better than the reality ever could be. I’d like to daydream about impossible dreams, ones that can never hurt me by possibly being realized. The sting of disappointment that comes from a dream grasped and then broken, shattered is more bitter than the ache of knowing that dreams are merely dreams and not something to be realized.

Why isn’t there some economic theory that would save us all from the volatile marketplace of the heart?

Am I in love? I don't know. Do I want to be? That, I really don't know.