I know you don’t know what
Love is it isn’t
Dagwood kisses on the way to work
It’s going to work
Love could be but it’s not
A 50/50 partnership
Matched sets of polished lies
A usury of affection
I understand that you don’t understand
Money don’t grow on trees
And if it did,
Those trees would grow
So far away
It would be work to get it
L’argent, by Lorenzo Thomas
Lately, I’ve been thinking about romantic Love. Gross, I know. And strange, too, given I’ve spent the last three years celibate. But it’s spring, and I want to, and those are good enough reasons to do anything. Thinking about Love and all of its complications, its inherent delusions, but mainly, love and its insistence that it has, can, and will continue to transcend class. Of course, I don’t believe this. I know better. In my personal experience, it has never been possible to delay the inevitable bitterness that sets in. But then again, I’ve also always been The Poor.
If Jane Austen was right about anything, it was that wealthy men really do get it up for A Poor. Indeed, I’ve attracted a stream of moneyed suitors in my life, from men with trust funds to men who made more in a month than both my parents combined ever did in a year. At the ripe age of thirty-three, a conclusion I draw from this is that the chip on my shoulder, the one I’ve been carrying around my whole life, cannot be brushed off by the moneyed hand of a lover. In the same way, I have written about the futility of the bourgeois attempting to shake off his caste through subculture, I am still in debt in expensive restaurants, in the passenger seat of nice cars, or holding 80$ bouquets of orchids. I am only ever pretending in the rich man’s house.
Capitalist society needs to push the idea that class status is something that can be overcome or improved. This myth is foundational to any capitalist plan, so it applies to romantic relationships as well. Romance within the class divide remains timeless and massively appealing precisely because it is such a fool’s paradise.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Pride and Prejudice. I love the idea that you can have your cake and eat it, too, romantically speaking. You could remain principled, at least long enough to make a point that your roots aren’t entirely dug up when you merge with someone else, someone with more power. But, let’s be real here.
The endlessly re-invented love conquers all narrative; the rescue fantasy, no matter what form it takes, implies the same thing: that once you have found The One ™, your individual and dissonant class contexts will simply merge as one, the differences fading in the background of your Great Love. One trope that works in tandem with these is the Wealth Barrier trope, in which bourgeois characters in media are depicted as having unfulfilled and lonely lives, with a vague acknowledgment that True Love cannot be bought. This idea that no matter the class divide, they are both searching for the same thing paints a false notion of equality that they can provide for each other with the same level of fulfillment without imposing on the other.
Of course, we know how rare this is. At the end of the day, it is usually the one with less financial or social means that end up swept up in a new life, which will be called progress or transformation, but is nothing short of assimilation.
I don’t intend on spending too much time1 on Pretty Woman, but on a recent re-watch, I was struck by how little of Vivian’s “old” life, her roots, were integrated into their new joint lives. Even something as small as Vivian riding the limo back struck me as sad because even without Edward, she’s still this stranger to herself now, not entirely convinced it’s for the best but unable to go back to who she was once, now adorned with new standards she didn’t set herself. Her context is her entire personhood here, and it shifts to accommodate Edward’s own suffocating prison of bourgeoisdom.
The danger lies in one set of class norms ruling over the other, twisting one partner’s sense of normalcy into whatever the other is comfortable with. The threat is leaving some part of you behind, as though what has made you into the person you are today can be discarded willy nilly, as though it is inherently worse or less valuable than the future a moneyed partner could provide.
There is no avoiding power dynamics when discussing class discrepancies in relationships. Because no matter where or how you met, the intensity of the connection, the strength of it, or the size of the gap between you, class will inevitably come into play. For me, even suburban middle-class partners could trigger feelings of alienation. By brushing off the luxury of growing up having two cars, for example, or the privilege of a backyard, I distinctly remember feeling emotional as I explained to my boyfriend at the time that I grew up in the city, that I remember sitting on the narrow balcony of the second-floor duplex apartment and watching the landlord and his family, who lived downstairs, eating and laughing in their backyard, which even when empty, was always off-limits to us.
We grow up and rationalize class in this profoundly unproductive way, and it surprises us when it comes back up, again and again, the elephant in the room, the context begging to be recognized. A collective denial seems to exist regarding the depth of impact class has on our nervous systems, how deeply rooted it is in us and our instincts, and how it follows us around and informs every decision we make. We cling to the belief that we can grow into or out, of these things. Still, by treating it as an individual problem instead of a societal one, we miss the big picture and simply reinforce the capitalist narrative that “the right one is just around the corner,” you know, like a pair of shoes. That the right one won’t ever make you think about class.
When sitting across from the heir of a seven hundred thousand dollar trust, I was confronted with constant neurotic downplaying. With this kind of wealth and security comes an entitlement, of course. Still, more importantly, there is an ironic, frenetic paranoia, a sort of greed that motivates everything, that lingers around afterward, that can never be soothed. Creating insecurity so ugly it takes on a life of its own becomes the thing you sleep next to and the resentment that leads to separation.
How much are we deluding ourselves when we enter into relationships with people in completely different financial situations than we are? With the blending and blurring of class lines, i.e.: bourgeois entering working-class spaces more than ever, the likeliness of meeting someone outside of your caste is increasing. The internet, too, blurs these lines for those who want them blurred. But the fact remains that our class contexts define how we love and define our capacity for true intimacy, and we are not richer (lol) for dismissing them.
I don’t know. Maybe I’ve just run into the closed fist of the bourgeois too many times.
Simply because the nuances of s*x w*rk are not mine to navigate or speak on
so, so good. and such hard medicine for some to swallow... i'd rather maintain my sense of self (my own historical context, morals and ethics literally burned into you from a lower class upbringing, etc) even if the delusions of partnerships like this would make life more "comfortable".