Welcome back, lovers. Did you miss me? Because I missed you. It’s been a while since All About Love has been on my mind purely because life has been happening so quickly outside the margins of the stories I write about. A whole summer has passed by quicker than I can eat a pistachio tart at Crust Bakery, of which I can no longer go in the mornings because I am no longer on the West Coast. You heard it here, this girl is back in Eastern Canada. Montreal, I am coming back for you; you haven’t gotten rid of me quite yet, despite the series of unfortunate events that occurred last time I slept beneath your starless skies.
I went to a baseball game yesterday, and sometime between the second and third inning, I became convinced that Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Now, this was also at the same time my edible kicked in so it might’ve been that, but I swear I could see him there, somewhere beneath the Rogers Centre, rolling in the dirt while little men in colour coded uniforms ran around catching balls and swinging sticks for entertainment. I had just downed an iced tea the size of my head and my eyes got that weightless, itchy feeling they usually do, so naturally this seemed like the most political revelation of my life. We were paying money to sit in a stadium on little plastic seats and watch men perform while enormous screens screamed at us about what else to buy.
Beers. Cars. Insurance. Fast Food. Credit cards. A brand spanking new life, evidently enough. I could go on too. Every few minutes the game stopped being a game and became an advertisement for the rest of your pathetically forever-consuming existence. I thought, Jesus Christ, this is capitalism so blatant that I don’t even need my glasses to see it.
And then, because my brain was apparently determined to become UofT’s least employable (honorary) philosophy student now that I was in Toronto, I started thinking about The Hunger Games. The stadium suddenly looked like the arena in the Capitol. Everyone was dressed up in garishly bright garments (and face paint?) to watch violence become entertainment while advertisements danced around us, glittering with words of desire and temptation. Except instead of children fighting to the death, it was baseball, which is arguably much less dystopian but also somehow exactly as American. We weren’t being forced to watch and that was the important part. We had paid to be there and had voluntarily entered the spectacle. We wanted it and paid big bucks to be there. We craved the lights and the giant screens and the music and the collective scream when the ball went somewhere it was supposed to go, somewhere that took me until the end of the game to figure out. That ritual of being spectators? We would kill for it. And maybe that’s the genius of capitalism: it doesn’t always have to force you into the machine. Sometimes it just makes the machine look really fucking fun.
That was when I started thinking about the city, and how much of urban life is basically being sold the opportunity to feel something. Toronto is particularly good at this, I’ve noticed in my short time of being here. It sells you dinner, but what you’re really buying is romance basked in candlelight that probably came from a pack of twenty tea light candles from Amazon. It sells you a nineteen dollar cocktail, but what you’re truly buying is the possibility that tonight you’ll become the kind of person who drinks nineteen dollar cocktails, the kind of person who wears leather and smells like cool verbena or something else equally sexy. It sells you a condo with floor-to-ceiling windows and what you’re actually buying is a fantasy about who you could be when you wake up there. Concerts, restaurants, bars, baseball games, rooftop patios, clubs, tiny apartments with exposed brick, little bottles of perfume, and anything you name it, all of which seem to whisper the same thing: you could be having a better life than the one you’re currently having, and we know exactly what you need to purchase to get there!
And isn’t that also how dating works now too? You walk through a city full of beautiful people and everyone is both consumer and product. Your face is an advertisement, your body is an advertisement, your personality is an advertisement, and your instagram is one big perfectly curated photo dump of an advertisement. Desire has become a marketplace listing and suddenly everyone has an account.
The longer I sat and stared at these little men running about trying to catch a ball my eyes were too close-sighted to see, I thought more about this transactional way of dating that is so subconsciously set within today’s society. I’ve seen friends swiping through people like we’re browsing a catalogue, assessing bone structure and height and humour and whether or not someone looks like they would ruin our lives in some interesting way or another. Hell, I’ve even been participating in this little game as long as it gives me a story by the end of it. And then, after all this careful selection, we still end up wanting the one thing that cannot be efficiently purchased or optimized: to be known.
Maybe that’s why sex makes so much sense in a city and love makes so little sense. Sex is so embarrassingly accessible it’s practically everywhere . It’s dripping off billboards in downtown areas and advertised in every trailer ever. You can meet someone at a bar, go home with them, wake up in their apartment, leave before breakfast and never see them again. However when I think about that, maybe it is kind of beautiful actually. There is something almost liberating about two people wanting each other without pretending it has to end up with marriage or be some kind of fantastical, serendipitous string of fate. Hell, it doesn’t even have to mean a second date. Desire can be immediate and anonymous and it can exist perfectly without even knowing someone’s middle name. Love, unfortunately, is so much less efficient and so much more time-consuming. I think it requires seeing someone when they are not particularly attractive or particularly riveting, not dressed for some occasion or performing the version of themselves that first made you want them. It's staying long enough for the advertisement to expire and long still than even the end credits- which is something that society is beating out of the young. After all, doesn’t everyone want that immediate dopamine hit? I know I do.
And maybe that is what I’ve been thinking about lately, not solely thoughts limited to the baseball-field-adjacent food for thought. How difficult it is to be young and in love in a city that is constantly encouraging you to keep shopping. There is always another person or party, another bar or apartment or another version of yourself waiting around the corner. There is something almost violently seductive about the possibility of becoming someone else.
By the time of the eighth inning, I had completely forgotten about the game happening beneath me and my attention was completely redirected to the people around me. While there were advertisements telling us what to want, there were still thousands of people creating things no company could manufacture: the way someone leaned their head against their boyfriend’s shoulder, the way a father explained the game to his daughter (thanks, Dad), the way a girl screamed when the Jays got a home run and immediately grabbed her friend’s hand. Those were the moments that made the whole thing feel inherently human. It was the fact that all these people had come here because humans are apparently desperate to experience things together. Cute, right.
Maybe that is what I love about cities despite everything I hate about them at the same time. They’re enormous machines that turn human attention into money, but they also put you in the path of other people. You can be lonely in the safety of your own isolated bedroom, but you cannot walk through downtown Toronto at midnight without being reminded that there are thousands of other people awake, wanting things, fucking people, breaking up, going home alone, falling in love, getting drunk, making mistakes. The city is constantly reminding you that your private little life is happening alongside millions of other private little lives.
Love is the strangest rebellion against all of it. It is profoundly irrational from a capitalist perspective. Why choose one when you can keep looking? Detachment is more optimal than the emotional connection we form through attachment; why donate to someone the most valuable thing you possess–your time– when you could be using it to become more desirable?
You might be asking yourself how I could’ve possibly gone from enjoying my first ever Blue Jays game to contemplating the meaning of love in a capitalist world and to be honest with you, I truly don’t know. Maybe next time I’ll just get a churro.The Jays won, but don’t ask me how. I genuinely don’t remember. What I remember is walking out of the Rogers Centre with the city glowing around me, thinking about Karl Marx and sex and money and love and the Hunger Games and how strange it is that we have built an entire civilization around convincing ourselves that we are free while simultaneously telling us what to do. What to buy, what to desire, who to fuck, who to become, the list is endless. I think that maybe the greatest thing you can do in a city like this is refuse to let everything become a simple transactional exchange. Maybe that means letting someone love you without asking what they can offer you, or you can offer them. It could mean letting yourself miss someone without immediately feeling the need to replace them. Because truly, why can’t a night just remain a night?
I suppose that’s what I was really thinking about, underneath all the Marxism and advertisements and the baseball players and my extremely sophisticated iced-tea-induced political consciousness. We spend so much of our lives being told to consume experiences that will make us feel alive when feeling alive was never something you could buy in the first place. It’s the feeling of setting up your first big girl apartment in Montreal with your girls and a bottle of white wine. It’s also receiving handwritten letters from your lover on the West Coast, with scribbled letters but ink spills of love. It's walking home in a city that glitters all around you, with the thought that your life is just beginning and it is yours alone to live.
All in all, I think there are some things the market still hasn’t figured out how to sell us.
