I’ve read and reread Labor of Love, admiring Weigel’s organization and readability: She has managed to write a substantial book about dating for a popular audience, in the hope that, by understanding historical patterns, we’ll better understand our own tendencies. The lesson is smooth, but the effect is alienating...My reservations about the book had less to do with the book’s argument than the fact that I fail to connect with Weigel’s sensibility. And because these universals—of love and fulfillment—are so personal, it felt jarring to be caught in her logic...It’s not her, it’s me, in other words. But my reaction speaks to the paradoxical nature of a 'dating culture' that applies the most normative ideals to the most personal objectives.
If the connections between work, commerce, and love seem fuzzy in Weigel’s telling, perhaps that’s the point. We all know that the economy determines many of our social and sexual mores, but the details of how it does so are hard to tease out with any precision...Weigel’s intuition that our dating lives feel unsatisfactory not just because of human error and the vagaries of love but because they reflect in every detail the unjust, exploitative economic and political system within which they take place, is a very dark one — this, too, surely, is the stuff of horror movies, where the threat is both inside and outside us, not to be escaped. That she has chosen such a worthy foe makes it seem all the stranger that when the time for battle approaches, Weigel turns coy. What exactly are these mysterious new ways of loving and living toward which she hopes we will direct our efforts?
Weigel is best when dismantling pop theories through the ages...But the book often struggles to make clear connections from chapter to chapter...More seriously, the book has a surprisingly narrow focus. It’s written from the vantage of a straight, white, middle-class woman and seldom strays from that perspective. Weigel mostly ignores lesbian relationships (aside from a passing reference to 'sugar mommies,' a phenomenon that always felt like pure media exaggeration) and offers only a cursory history of gay activism that neglects recent, relevant debates like marriage equality.
The lack of serious conversation about dating has left Weigel with rich territory to explore, and she makes excellent use of it...Her deliciously incisive observations run throughout the book, making it a thoroughly enjoyable read. At times, however, her attempts to tie each dating trend to the economic circumstances of its time can seem forced...but either way, Weigel presents an insightful analysis of a topic that has largely been left to hucksters and scolds.
The scholar in Ms. Weigel didn’t set a fine-grain filter on the research for this book. She always returns to the 'landscape of dating' as her intended theme, but the landscape appears horizonless and the detours can be maddeningly circuitous. Just a small sample of subjects that catch her eye include prostitution; historical parenting trends; the American military’s treatment of homosexuals; the aesthetic theories of Kant; and anticolonial revolutions in Latin America. These frequent changes in direction require Ms. Weigel to make some textbooklike transitions: 'The rise of college and the spread of coeducation in the 20th century also shaped the history of dating.' The book is hung on many statements like that one, true but awfully broad...Labor of Love skims over an enormous number of topics, many of which could prop up entire books of their own. It’s hard to tell whether Ms. Weigel’s aim is far too ambitious or not nearly ambitious enough.
Weigel questions and argues with many of her sources, but in some instances she is not critical enough ... She makes an entirely convincing case that there never was and never will be one static way of dating. But as we approach the present, Weigel is hesitant to leave behind her sources and authoritatively identify our new moment, in which online dating has been almost entirely destigmatised.
...[a] sprightly, gently feminist history...Weigel's attempts to link dating conventions (and marriage patterns) to the economy are intriguing, if not always fully convincing.
The high point is Weigel's parallel between two institutions: dating and the economy. This parallel is utterly absorbing and makes for such exotic bedfellows as Herbert Marcuse and Milton Friedman ... Labor of Love is a cornucopian investigation, bright and critical, though at times with all the music of a graduate term paper. Weigel occasionally regurgitates source material wholesale, rather than shading it into the otherwise engrossing narrative. Above all, we're left with that fascinating connection between work world and dating world. Dating, like work, is transactional, and work is the bottom line for everyone.
