Renting Love Is Better Than Owning

Hypothesis: Capitalism is grooming us to rent everything, our homes, our cars, our cell phones….and coming soon…our love lives.

Swiping is renting?

Dating apps have already broken any sense of traditional love because our brains are now wired to expect a daily heap of fresh meat, I mean potential suitors.

We have grown to expect a neverending stream of potential love mates with no discernible off-ramp when we want to commit to a single person.

We used to “own” each other

Love and possession have a long twisted history. Even today, in 2022, those pretty little Valentine’s heart candies still say, “Be Mine,” which is only marginally more palatable than, “You’re Mine,” which implies outright human ownership.

It was so much easier to “own” your spouse when roles were cemented: women at home, men at work, kids at school. Nobody could find anybody all day if they weren’t near a landline.

Everybody knew where we were supposed to be, so we rarely checked on each other. We had no concept we’d someday be carrying a device that would spy on us, sharing our whereabouts, thoughts, pictures, and videos with the entire world in real-time and robbing us of any semblance of privacy on any level.

Sure, people have always had affairs and hidden lovers, but plausible deniability was usually all it took to get away with it. There simply was no objective, empirical way to catch someone who left work early or went to a secret girlfriend’s apartment instead of the library…or anywhere else, because they were essentially unreachable.

We are already living in a “love renting” society

I’m 56-years-old, not particularly hot looking, and certainly not rich, but I am articulate, have a profession, am generally kind and considerate, and am either approached or “chatted with” at least once a month by a woman around my age asking if I’d like to hang out with them.

With one exception, every woman who’s started to talk with me at a diner, in a store, or while walking in the park, was married. The few I ended up “hanging” out with, weren’t necessarily looking for sex, their husbands, for one reason or another, simply were not accessible or available to them to do the things they like to do. They were married but alone. Not unhappy, just alone.

I spent one Saturday morning walking with a 90-year-old woman whose husband was bedridden and who just wanted to walk and talk with a “young” man.

One woman, with whom I became genuine friends, told me straight up, that if there was a computer app to rent a man for a day, as Uber or Airbnb does with cars and homes, she’d pay good money for one. I asked her why she wasn’t compensating me and she said she would’ve paid an unspecified amount for my company — then she asked me how much I’d pay her. Needless to say, I never asked a woman that particular question again. But I caught her point — sometimes, married or not, we crave something fresh, something new, something unpredictable, something a little dangerous.

Traditional marriage vs multiple partners vs hookup culture

Traditional marriage continues to be the gold standard for two people deeply in love. And to be transparent, I am not looking to “hook up” with a married woman….or any woman who isn’t interested in having a monogamous relationship. And please don’t take this as a moral judgment or victory. I’ve made mistakes and misjudgments, as many of us have, but as I enter my late fifties, I’m not interested in tracking someone else’s whereabouts or existing in a state of nervousness and apprehension. If you want to spend the day with me, and me with you, let’s make it a glorious day…and nothing more — rent me.

While cheating and adultery have been around forever, technology has provided a confusing, somewhat volatile, mix of swiping, surveillance, and profoundly easy access to our neighbors, with whom in the past we’d never even cross paths.

Partly because of equal rights for women, partly because of the sexual revolution, and partly because we’re living in a time of changing mores and religious beliefs, men and women no longer need each other in order to survive financially, culturally, sexually, or socially.

We want someone to be there for us at the end of the day, but we don’t need them to complete us. We’re already complete.

That said, don’t mistake my feeling “complete” as a desire to be alone. I enjoy people and socializing too much to be a couch potato (no offense to couches or potatoes).

Summarymonogamous

So what do I mean by, “Renting Love Is Better Than Owning?” Do I literally mean we will rent a man or a woman like we do party equipment or scuba gear? No. But we have to stop thinking of love as something we possess or own. We don’t own another human being. We can’t control someone else’s emotions, patience, desires, or level of commitment.

We’ve got to start appreciating social adventures in their own right as stand-alone events. My walk with the 90-year-old lady mattered to me (and I hope to her) as much as any conversation I’ve had with anyone else…and it sure beat walking alone that particular morning. I’m sure her husband didn’t mind me “borrowing” her.

My hope is to meet people and love them one day at a time…hopefully adding up to many, many “one days.”

Will those “one day at a time,” last forever. Maybe not. Will I feel hurt and sorrowful if someone breaks my heart….again? Yes. Am I willing to believe someone who tells me they will love me forever? No.

Will I ever love someone else forever, exclusively? I hope so. But if I do, I won’t own her…and she won’t own me.

We’ll just rent.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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