Can’t buy me love: profiting from loneliness
Description
It is 7.30pm on a Saturday evening, and I am on my way to a seminar in a central London hotel on how to find the ideal partner. I pass a number of restaurants and bars, full of couples apparently in love, laughing and talking together.
The seminar I am attending is not speed dating or a singles event, but a course entitled “Love & Soulmate with Kathryn Alice”. For £75 a ticket, delegates are treated to a motivational talk from the warm-up act—a young man who told us how we can open our hearts to each other—and a seminar from the love guru herself.
Alice, a Californian, resplendent in flowing blonde locks, pale-grey linen and a fixed, serene smile, is the author of Love Will Find You: Nine Magnets for Bringing You and Your Soul-mate Together (Avalon, 2007) and a number of CDs and audio products.
Alice lectures on love all over the world, and has, according to the delegates on my table, somewhat of a cult following. “I was about to fly to California to meet her,” said Irene (not her real name), a middle-aged Asian woman who has been single since her husband left her a decade ago, “but then I saw an advertisement for this seminar. I could not believe it. It must be fate.”
Although the seminar is clearly a money-making event, Alice is not raking it in like a number of others in the “love for sale” market. The hire of the hotel ballroom on a Saturday evening, plus the DJ, warm-up act and administration and advertising costs, would not leave a huge amount of change out of the joining fee. Perhaps such events are seen as loss-leaders, there to promote supplementary materials and encourage people to sign up to the more expensive one-to-one sessions.
The UK organiser of the event, Gail De Souza, agreed to speak to me following my revelation that I was at the seminar to research an article on the commercialisation of loneliness. De Souza told me that she had made a financial loss on the event, but that she did it “out of love”. The room was only about half-full, and many of the people there were linked to the organisers, but nevertheless such an approach to finding your true love can be addictive. Many of those attending had been to several such seminars previously and said they would continue until they found their soulmate.
Some will acquire a taste for such methods of meeting a partner and will go on to hire personal “dating trainers” to help them with their online search skills; pay for advice from a “flirt coach”; or even travel the world to other events like “Love & Soulmate”, believing that, as they are about to be told by Kathryn Alice, “There is someone for everyone out there. You WILL find them.”
This event is one of many examples of the increasing commercialisation of loneliness. The advertising industry has capitalised on people’s desire to find their soulmate and live happily ever after, and it has gone way beyond online dating services.
The dating scene is getting seriously pricey. A year with bespoke dating agency Berkeley International will set you back well over £10,000. Then there are dating “boot camps” such as Kama Lifestyles, which costs more than £1000 a day. Not only is the online dating business huge, there are now virtual dating assistants such as Vida Consultancy that, as it claims on its website, “specialises in getting dates with women you want to date, does all the work. YOU get all the credit. It SUCKS sending message after message to women who never write you back. What’s worse is if you’re getting any messages at all, they’re probably not from the girls you want to meet.”
Then there is Sam Owen, one of a number of so-called relationship coaches, based in Cheshire. Owens offers sessions at £200 per hour. There are also “flirtology” classes, such as the course run by Jean Smith, who describes herself as a social and cultural anthropologist. Smith claims in her publicity that “flirting is a science”.
How did anyone manage to date, fall in love, or find a life partner before these people began charging you money to achieve it?
Money and sex have long gone together. We only have to look at the scandal involving hacked and leaked information on its members from the online infidelity site Ashley Madison. “Ionly signed up to catfish lonely liberal women,” commented one former member of below an online article on the topic.
Dr Catherine Hakim, in a report for the free-market think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), argued that prostitution should be legalised and treated like any other financial transaction, such as paying to eat in a restaurant. In her 2015 report, Supply and Desire: Sexuality and the Sex Industry in the 21st Century, Hakim claims that the “sexual deficit” among heterosexual men (meaning that they want more sex than do women of the same age) can be addressed by legitimising the purchase of sex, and that decriminalising Britain’s £4 billion sex industry would increase protection of women. Despite there being no credible evidence for her claims, there are a number of countries in recent years, including the UK, that have had their GDP boosted by estimates of their economies that include the profit from the drug and sex industries.
