Love’s best habit: The uses of media in romantic relationships

The uses of media discourses

As we will explain later, we view media discourses of romantic love as working like a language. Although, like any language, media discourses constrain agency, without agency a language is a lifeless structure. A language that no one speaks is a dead language. Therefore, rather than begin with romantic media and show how these shape people’s romantic practices, we begin with romantic practices. It is these practices, we argue, that make socially manifest what we think of as romantic love. To repeat, this is not to deny that there exist dominant media discourses of romantic love, only to insist that these discourses are used in ways that are both active and historical.

Although it is not difficult to find examples of stories of romantic love throughout recorded history, it is really only at the end of the 18th century, and expanding rapidly throughout the 19th century, that romantic love becomes in the West an increasingly visible part of a shared public culture and a widely accepted means to happiness and self-fulfilment. As social historian Edward Shorter points out: ‘The romantic revolution . . . began late in the eighteenth century, sweeping across vast reaches of class and territory in the nineteenth to become, in the twentieth, the unassailable norm of courtship behaviour’ (1977: 152).

The widespread development of this ‘unassailable norm’, as something socially visible and widely accepted, and as the main social practice of sexual and emotional intimacy, coincided with the development of romantic media. As the historian Lawrence Stone observes, ‘after 1780 romantic love and the romantic novel grew together’ (1977: 190). The sociologist, Anthony Giddens makes much the same point: ‘The rise of romantic love more or less coincided with the emergence of the [romantic] novel’ (1992: 40). This was also a view shared by contemporary commentators: ‘Of all the arrows which Cupid has shot at youthful hearts, [the romantic novel] is the keenest. There is no resisting it. It is literary opium that lulls every sense into delicious rapture’ (The Universal Magazine, 1772, quoted in Stone, 1977: 190). Moreover, as François de la Rochefoucauld claimed, writing a little earlier: ‘There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing’ (quoted in Stone 1977: 191). This may have been intended as a mocking jibe at those supposedly too stupid to be able to think for themselves, but we do not think that what he identifies implies self-deception; rather we take it as an unknowing recognition of the fact that we actively learn to do many of the things we assume to be natural. But the real problem with presenting this particular narrative of the relationship between media and romantic love is that it can often imply a one-way flow of influence from media discourse to romantic practice. This is almost certainly what the Universal Magazine had in mind when it used the term ‘literary opium’. Working from this assumption, the only valid reason to research media and romantic love is to explore ‘media effects’. We totally reject this reduction. Instead our focus is on what people do with media, rather than what media make them do. ⁸ This does not mean a denial of media influence, but a recognition that influence is not a consequence of passivity, but a complex process that always involves agency and use.

Paradoxically, the active use of media discourses often takes the form of situating them in relation to some idea of natural instinct. As a result we often encountered a certain cognitive dissonance. For example, when asked what influences how we fall in love, Interviewee 2 was quite clear, ‘My natural instincts.’ He then thought about this for a moment and then added, ‘Obviously there are films that you think, oh, I’ve been influenced by that film or you watch that film and you think, OK, that’s how I sometimes feel.’ According to Interviewee 4:

I think it [media] influences what your expectations of what love should be.… Some films show a relationship in different stages. So you feel like that you go into a relationship and you’re at that stage and then you have an expectation from what you have seen in the media of what is going to come next. So you’re not letting it naturally progress, you are being influenced by something and you are waiting for something that you expect to happen to happen, when that might not be the natural thing to happen. If that doesn’t happen you feel disappointed and you’re like, no, that’s not how it should be, it should be this way, not that way.

In both of these examples influence is something actively recognized and not something passively experienced.

Sometimes the influence of media is very direct. When discussing what defines a romantic situation, Interviewee 3 said: ‘Sometimes there are moments when you think, oh, this is really nice, this is just like a movie.’ When Interviewee 2 talked about taking his girlfriend away for a romantic weekend, he cited media as the source of his inspiration:

You see it on … Coronation Street, the latest new couple go away for the weekend to somewhere and they come back with a sun tan and a smile on their faces and you think like they’re happy. But you don’t really think about that at the time, but when you’re asking me these questions where am I getting it from. Am I thinking from my friends? No, because my mates are blokes, they don’t let on what they do with their other half. My Mum and Dad don’t do it; my brothers you would rarely hear them do it, but they probably do. So the only … place I do see it from is TV.

Part of the way in which media discourses influence romantic practice is in terms of comparison; that is, we compare what we see or hear with what is happening or what we hope will happen in our own romantic relationships. Interviewee 1 told us that watching certain television programmes ‘makes some lads insecure, ’cos you sort of think, oh, you have to look this way or you have to act a certain way if you want to get this girl, or you have to have a certain profession or a certain skill about you’. Similarly, Interviewee 3 told us how she completed a Valentine’s Day quiz in a woman’s magazine in which answers supposedly indicated the life expectancy of a romantic relationship. ‘I think I got really paranoid afterwards because it didn’t come back very well and it says, oh, you’re not going to be together forever.’ She also told us, ‘I love Jane Austen and I always used to think, oh, I’m going to meet Mr Darcy, and my boyfriends have always been poor and never had any money, so that’s never happened.’ Similarly, ‘When I see romantic comedies I think, oh, why doesn’t my boyfriend do that?’ Interviewee 11 articulated this aspect of media use very clearly:

I think that we inevitably, albeit often unconsciously, measure what we feel against what is depicted in books, films, television series or songs.… I have caught myself feeling a pang of loss or deprivation when watching certain films or listening to certain songs even though I was in a happy relationship. In contrast, I have glorified a fairly destructive relationship for its extreme intensity that ‘lived up to’ the standards set by the above.… In my experience, people also frequently draw upon examples from books, films or television in their attempts to make sense of or evaluate romantic experiences. I have often heard statements like ‘He/she is my X’ – the X being a character in a novel/film/TV series, or giving examples from TV/film as recommendations/warnings.

Interviewees were often critical of media accounts of being in love:

I think in films it’s portrayed as perfect and there’s not any ups and downs unless there’s an argument between another girl and another boy or people mistaking something for something else. That tends to be what happens in films and then in real life there’s a lot of ups and downs, anything can break a relationship from distance to trust to anything. (Interviewee 8)

Interviewee 5 made a similar point. ‘You see in the movies all the time guys are like – got these banners “I love you” and send them roses and all and I just wouldn’t do that, that’s just not me like.’ Interviewee 4 talked of ‘the rushed nature’ of media representations of romantic relationships in which:

developments happen so quick.… So everyone thinks you can go into a relationship and it will be all lovey dovey straightaway and it will be a happy ending. I think that’s how people see it. They think that they can attain that perfect relationship in a short space.

One of the things that is clear from our findings is that people do not passively consume media discourses and then translate them unproblematically and straightforwardly into social practices of romantic love. Instead we continually encountered a dialogue between media discourses and the active consumption practices of romantic agents. We think that the best way to understand the romantic power of media is to conceptualize it as working like a language; a ‘language’ we have to work with in order to communicate our romantic feelings to others and to ourselves. To be clear, we do not mean media literally provide the language of romantic love, although at times they may in fact do this; rather we are suggesting that the discourses media produce work like a language in that they enable and constrain social practices of romantic love. To be in love, therefore, is to locate oneself in a network of meanings and practices (often contradictory) produced and/or circulated by the media which establish a system of romantic ‘common sense’ or what we might call a romantic ‘regime of truth’. ⁹ And because media discourses of romantic love operate like a language we need to recognize that the performance of a language and language as a system are quite different: the language spoken does not dictate the act of speaking; the speaker actively selects from the resources the language makes available. In this way, then, although media discourses of romantic love both enable and constrain agency, they certainly do not dictate romantic practice as would be assumed by the ‘media effects’ model. It is like speaking any language, we are situated in a structure that both enables and constrains our ability to understand and to communicate and, as with language competence generally, there are different levels of media-derived romantic literacy. Umberto Eco’s much-quoted definition of the postmodern attitude we think points to this:

I think of the post-modern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her ‘I love you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. (1985: 17)

This may or may not identify a postmodern attitude, but for us it certainly identifies people with high levels of media-derived romantic literacy. Media discourses, therefore, do not directly shape romantic practice, rather they provide the language from which romantic practice is articulated – a structure that both enables and constrains romantic agency. But, and this is a very important but, we have to stay within the romantic ‘common sense’ or the romantic ‘regime of truth’ in order to remain romantically intelligible to others and to ourselves. As a result romantic practice only becomes recognizable as romantic practice through conformity with media-derived standards of romantic intelligibility (to deviate from these standards may cause ‘translation’ problems). ¹⁰

This does not mean that our experiences of being in love are some kind of pre-scripted ‘false consciousness’ in which our emotional reactions are simple media creations. What the interviews make clear is that media discourses do not have the effect of dictating romantic practice. They offer a language; a language people use to articulate the meaning of their own experience of romantic love. Part of the form this agency takes is in the way media discourses are both recognized and negotiated with. ¹¹ Interviewee 1, for example, suggested that the media promote a certain promiscuity (‘it’s sort of like have sex with as many people as you can’), while at the same time telling us that he had refused the possibility of sex with a woman he was in love with because she was the ex-girlfriend of his best friend. Interviewee 13 captures perfectly the duality of recognition and negotiation: ‘I wouldn’t say we consume all these images without question, we are given an array of visions and we choose amongst them the one(s) we “like” which we then adapt to our “needs”.’ But she was also fully aware that although we can select from the repertoire of media discourses we are not able to choose another repertoire. As she explained it, referring specifically to romantic films: ‘I suppose there is some room for negotiation, but it is limited, because you only have the films available to choose from and they are often very similar views of love.’ In other words, to continue with our language metaphor, although we cannot escape the language, we can speak it in many different ways.

Listening romantically to music is a good example of the active use of media discourses. As we expected, many of the interviewees talked about how particular songs had played a significant role in their romantic experiences. Although many of the interviewees identified music as something to relax with or as background to a romantic setting, most suggested that music was almost always used to reactivate a romantic memory; it had an archival function in that it allowed them to return affectively to a romantic situation in the past. Interviewee 6 gave a typical response:

It’s not something that particularly enhances it for me as in when I’m falling in love or if I am in love. I don’t think the music is something I think about at the time. For me it has always been afterwards.

Interviewee 4 made a similar point. ‘It was playing when I first got together with somebody in a relationship and I always remember that song.’ Interviewee 2 talked of how it ‘reminded me … I’m not going to regret it, it does remind me.’ Interviewee 1 told us that ‘every time I hear that song it always reminds me of that incident’. He also told us about other songs that made him think of her. It was very clear that these songs had a powerful affective charge in their ability to enable him to rearticulate the past.

I think of her straightaway.… Sometimes it can be a bit sad. You know like, I think it depends on what mood you’re in, ’cos sometimes when I hear that song I think, oh, yeah that was a really good night, we had a really good time. Then other times I think, oh, I’m never gonna be with her.

Interviewee 6 used music in much the same way:

I think with music and the emotion of love, I think sometimes when you have been in love and you hear music, you do especially if you’re on your own, you relate things that are in that music to yourself.… Lately, over the last four or five weeks, since I decided to distance myself from the girl I was telling you about, I was in a bit of a situation. I would say I was probably in a bit of a vulnerable state of mind and I was listening to music. Sometimes, if it was on I would find it was actually making me more kind of sad and making me think of that person more.

The uses of media technologies

We also discussed with our interviewees their use of media technologies. ¹² Many told us that these had played a very significant role in their romantic relationships. The two most important technologies identified were texting and Facebook. Texting was the media technology mentioned the most. Interviewee 9 gave a typical response: ‘I’d say 90 percent of the communication is by text and then I’d say mobile phone for like a quick 10 min phone call here and there.’

Sometimes the romantic relationship itself seemed to be held together by texting.

We just got on really well and we saw each other about three or four times I think over about six weeks.… [A]nd then we were texting a lot. A lot of it was based on texts and sending messages to each other and the fact that we only saw each other four times out of those six weeks I suppose was kind of irrelevant in the sense because we were texting a lot. (Interviewee 6)

Many interviewees told us how texting had the effect of speeding up the development of their romantic relationships. ‘I think it speeds things up more than anything, because now with phones [for texting] you can constantly be in contact’ (Interviewee 10). Interviewee 9 made much the same point.

I think I’m closer to him because you get to know someone quicker ’cos you’re texting them and like we do text quite a bit. And like in the early stages of us getting together that’s kind of like how we got to know each other and like we were texting quite a bit and so I think it does help you get to know them a bit closer.

Often it was the extent of texting that produced this effect.

Constantly, it wouldn’t stop, it was ridiculous, our phones would be silent if we were together. But if we weren’t together then they would be constantly going off. Even if we’d only been together that hour and I’d just come into uni for an hour he’d be texting me making sure I was OK, even though I’d be going back to his after.… It was constant. The only reason we would stop is if I was in a lecture or he was in an exam at college. (Interviewee 8)

Part of the speeding up is in terms of sexual intimacy. ‘I think you can be a bit more risky, a bit more rude, a bit more cheeky’ (Interviewee 1). ‘I think it’s easier for people to let themselves get more intimate than what it previously would’ve been’ (Interviewee 10).

Yeah, I think especially when you’re getting to know them, it’s easier to be a bit more brash than say if you just met them on the street out of the blue. I don’t think you’d be like, huh [he makes a noise suggesting sexual excitement]. (Interviewee 9)

Interviewee 8 pointed out how, in this context, texting could provide a screen to hide behind.

Yeah, you’ve got more confidence to message each other haven’t you. Rather than face to face.… I think in a message you can hide behind the words a bit: oh, I didn’t mean to send you that … I was drunk. If you say something stupid, my friend sent it. You’ve got a million excuses to not mean what you wanted to say.

Interviewee 6 also found texting sexually liberating:

I try to act the same in texts as I would do in person, but then I think that you do find yourself talking on text, or in fact on Facebook chat, you find yourself saying things that you probably truly wouldn’t say in person.… [W]hen you’re looking somebody in the eye, I think it’s sometimes difficult to actually say what you want to say. (Interviewee 6)

According to Interviewee 13, texting:

helped us seduce each other.… It allowed us to express ourselves and say those things which made us feel the urge and need for the other person even more.… It was precisely through text messages … that very ‘romantic’ and breath-taking things were said between us.

Interviewee 11 gave an example that went beyond the speeding up of sexual intimacy. In her case texting was a form of sexual intimacy:

My last relationship . . . began with a (tipsy) text message after not having seen each other in five years, and then largely developed by texting, email and Skype (without video) before we were able to see each other [they were living in different countries]. So in that case, the falling in love part really happened without any face-to-face interaction.

When they eventually met, their technologically enabled sex life continued into their face-to-face relationship. As she explained:

I also felt that this influenced how the relationship then actually worked. I remember, for instance, coming to [she names where her boyfriend lived] after months of not having seen each other, and what alienated me was that he immediately verbalized [as in a text] what he wanted to do when I had barely entered the house. Somehow, having just kissed me passionately and then went on to do what he was talking about would have been different.

Sometimes the speeding up caused by texting can have other negative effects:

But with texting it happens in fast motion, um, um, really fast, because I had a relationship with someone where we went out for a month and I really liked them, but from texting each other it just went down hill from there. (Interviewee 10)

She identified one reason for this negative effect. ‘I think ’cos it’s always in contact quite a lot … there’s not really a lot to say when you’ve met up afterwards.’ Constant texting can reveal too much too soon or it can simply feel like a prison house. Interviewee 2 complained that it denied him space. ‘I wanted space and she wouldn’t give it to me, so I just left my phone at home every now and then.’ It later became clear that leaving his phone at home meant telling her he had left it at home.

Texting can create other difficulties in a romantic relationship. Interviewee 14, who described her younger self as a ‘love detective’ always on the look out for evidence of attraction, had a different experience of texting, one that nevertheless indicates how important it is as a measure of romantic attachment. ‘I had the misfortune to fall in love with a very unenthusiastic texter … which meant that a low response rate to text was interpreted as evidence of a lack of interest.’

Text messaging also has the potential to create a record of the romantic relationship. It can work like an electronic diary in which are stored comments from both sides of the relationship. As Interviewee 6 explains,

I think looking back, ’cos that’s one thing you will do with text messages, ’cos your mobile phone will store a lot of messages.… I think when you have a situation like this [the end of a romantic relationship] one of the things you find yourself doing, which is probably more harmful than helpful, is looking back on everything you have said, and I did that and it was actually quite interesting. I don’t think it was harmful for me because it was more interesting to see what had happened.… It was interesting to try and find out why this individual had made me act differently and had made me feel differently, and how come it upset me and made me generally unhappy when things weren’t working.

Many of the interviewees included Facebook when talking about texting. They tended to use it in similar ways and, like texting, thought of it in relation to romantic relationships in both positive and negative terms. Interviewee 3, whose boyfriend is overseas, talked about ‘romantic times when we used to instant message each other on Facebook’. When asked what they talked about, she replied, ‘The boring things, like what I had done during the day and stuff.… I think it’s really important to have that sort of contact when someone is away for that long.’ It is clear that Facebook allowed them to maintain their romantic relationship in circumstances that put the relationship under great strain. Like Interviewee 3, Interviewee 7 told us that much of the conversation she has with her boyfriend on Facebook is often quite mundane. They would also do other things while they chatted:

I will be doing essays and that when I’m talking to him and I’ll say, oh, I’m not in the mood to do this essay and he says, yes, but if you just get it done it’s out of the way. If he’s had a really bad day at work, I’ll say, oh, it’ll be fine, it’s just another day at work. If I’m watching TV, I’ll tell him about it and he’ll tell me about the game he’s playing and things like that.

Clearly, Facebook allows them to talk and develop their relationship in a way that would normally only be possible in a situation of co-presence. Interviewee 11 used Skype in a similar way.

[We would] Skype very often all day when we are both at home. We then usually go about our own business most of the time but feel that the other is there.… We both work, for instance, but I have the iPad next to me and can glance at him every once in a while; or we leave it on when we go to sleep, and I might sleep already but he is still reading, or we have breaks together or in the end spend the evening together as if we had a proper date.

She then added:

I think that especially in times like these, when everyone is expected to be flexible and mobile in career terms, these media make a huge difference in how close you can feel to each other in spite of the distance, and it can enable at least a variety of everyday life together.

Like texting, Facebook also has the potential to undermine what it has helped to develop. As Interviewee 3 explained, ‘you can see on Facebook their ex and their ex emailing them ’cos they still got a house together that they can’t get rid of. I think that makes that relationship a bit more complicated.’ She told us of further complications when she discovered photographs of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend in his Facebook album. As she explained, ‘she wasn’t wearing that much clothes and obviously they upset me’. It became clear that it wasn’t just that these photographs existed, but that they existed in a public space: ‘if it was printed photos, I kind of understand that he would have photos of his ex around ’cos they were together quite a while’. So the photographs themselves were not the problem, it was their location that really caused her to feel upset. ‘I also felt a little humiliated, ’cos it’s on Facebook so everyone can see that he has still got pictures of his ex, which kind of reflects on me.’ Interviewee 5 was also aware of this problem:

If there is any pictures of me with like ex-girlfriends or girls I used to see, when I break up with them I remove them, ’cos the last thing you want to do when you’re looking at someone’s Facebook and saying, oh, that’s what their ex looks like.… [I]f she meets a lad, he’s gonna be like, wow, look at all these things, her and the ex-boyfriend … and that’s gonna put him under pressure … and he’s like shit, he bought her this hotel [a couple of nights in a hotel], they went to London for the weekend. I’m broke, what do I do? If there was no social network and then that lad would know nothing about me, he wouldn’t be able to click on profile to see where I’m from or what I do or whatever. He would probably forget about my name after a week.

Without Facebook the situation identified by Interviewees 3 and 5 would not be possible.

Interviewee 5 also told us how Facebook is changing the practical possibilities of romance:

Thirty years ago when my Dad met Mum, he said when he met her the next day he would phone her. See if you done that now the girl might go, here, I don’t remember you. By texts or Facebook, they don’t have to reply and if they don’t reply you know they are not interested.

Interviewee 6 gave another example of the use of Facebook in romantic practice. ‘If you see somebody on a night out and you get talking to them they would probably find it less personally invading to be asked if they could be your friend on Facebook than to ask for their number.’ But this may not be as benign as it sounds; it can lead to what he calls ‘Facebook stalking’. The technology offers the possibility of information that would have been unthinkable to lovers even in the recent past.

If I know nothing about her I go on their Facebook and I can find out every single thing about her; I can look through her pictures and see what her ex-boyfriend looked like, what her friends are like, what she likes.… Like, ‘I like a man who holds my hand in the dark’, say. You can tell everything they like and that’s really scary because when you go on the first date you know everything about them and you’re asking them questions that you already know. You’re asking them what do you study and it’s written on the top of her Facebook.

Conclusion

What our research findings have revealed is that although we are not simply passive consumers of media discourses and technologies, we are certainly not uninfluenced by them. The difficult trick is to understand how media discourses and technologies both enable and constrain social practices of romantic love. By talking to people about their media use when in a romantic relationship we hope to have produced a better understanding of their influence.

Our concern has been with what people do with media discourses and technologies, which may in some cases be nothing at all. So we did not begin with media discourses and technologies and then examine their use; rather, we began with accounts of everyday experiences of romantic love and then attempted to tease out how these are enabled and constrained by media discourses and technologies.

Our focus, therefore, was not on the media of romantic love, but on how people use media, both discourses and technologies, to make romantic love, to make it manifest in practice.