“Oh, what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” Tina Turner belted out in 1984, setting the stage for what many have billed as the most spectacular comeback in rock music history. Eight years earlier, Turner had left her husband and musical partner Ike Turner after a fight, with only 36 cents, a gas station credit card and the legal burdens of a canceled tour.

Turner’s throaty song, which went on to launch her prodigious solo career, is surprisingly ambiguous. In it, Turner is essentially asking, “What is love?” However, interestingly, Turner never literally asks the question in her song. Instead, like a wounded lover, she circles around the point, sketching in areas around the question but never truly quite getting there.

In “What’s Love Got to Do with It” Turner sings about the differences between rote physical sensation and love. She sings about her confusion – about experiencing something she has read “someplace” but can’t name. She sings about warding off something that scares her. And yet, the only thing she ever directly says about love in the song is that it’s a “second-hand emotion” – which is, in itself, a curious phrase. Is Turner saying love takes a back seat to sex? That love is something that has never truly belonged to her? That love is something that is so worn out that it is perennially unattractive?

Grappling with love
The Queen of Rock n’ Roll is not the first person to grapple with the subject of love. Throughout history, from Plato to Shakespeare to Oprah, love has always been a force that is at once overwhelmingly powerful and yet utterly perplexing. Humans have harnessed love to defy all kinds of obstacles but love is also something that itself inevitably defies understanding: We just can’t seem to figure it out.

While our century has undoubtedly taken up the mantle of “making sense” of love, modern times and modern capitalism has also led to the development of money-making industries around eros. These industries includes artists like Turner, who make their living off of writing and singing about the subject. However, the contemporary market has been particularly successful in focusing the discourse around love into an exploration of one, evidently marketable subject: dating.

Witness, for example, the phenomenally successful book on dating, “He’s Just Not That into You,” which has become a cultural touchstone for many Western women.  

Recently made into a movie starring romantic comedy powerhouses Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore and Ben Affleck, the book was written in 2004 by two former “Sex and the City” writers – a show whose bread and butter was exploring the idiosyncrasies of dating in the bourgeois world of single New York women.

The tome, which Oprah devoted an entire one of her shows to, offers a cannily simple answer to all the dating problems faced by single, straight women. Why did the guy you had a great date with not call? Why did your commitment-phobic boyfriend go on to marry only four months after ending your relationship? It’s not your fault, the book proselytises: He just wasn’t that into you. The message, uplifting for some, is that there is nothing wrong with anyone’s personality. Success in love just means people need to find someone that can truly appreciate who they already are.

Dating in the modern world
In addition to the many advice books, columns and podcasts on dating are the various matchmaking industries that have popped up in recent years to help alienated singles. In the late 1990s, a Los Angeles Rabbi organised the first speed dating event in the hopes that more Jewish singles would marry each other. But the dating service that is currently gaining the most momentum is online dating.

Once considered something only for the nerdy or desperate, the stigma associated with online dating is quickly evaporating. “Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love without looking for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalogue to instead wander the stacks because 'the right books are found only by accident,' Wired Magazine wrote in a 2002 article. “Serendipity is the hallmark of inefficient markets and the marketplace of love, like it or not, is becoming more efficient."

In the meantime, online dating services are becoming increasingly diversified. There are sites dedicated to meeting someone of the same faith, such as JDate, which helps Jewish people find a partner. Manhunt, while it sounds like some sort of James Bond video game, is a popular online dating site for gay men. Black Christians looking for a partner can turn to Black Christian People Meet. In 2005, Americans spent over 500 million dollars on online dating and personals, the largest segment of paid content on the web other than pornography, according to a study by the Online Publishers Associate and comScore networks.

Der Flirter
Joining the growing field of dating expertise and services is the self-proclaimed flirting expert Philip von Senftleben, or as he calls himself, “Der Flirter,” who has recently made headlines for a seminar he taught on flirting at Potsdam University, just south of Berlin.

The 38-year-old, who also writes and has a radio show about flirting, sums up his job in a remarkably simple way: teaching people how to "get someone else's heart beating fast while yours stays calm." Der Flirter’s lessons range from how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, how to impress people at parties, how to dress and what topics to discuss on dates.

Just in case, he also teaches people how to cope with rejection. Yet, Senftleben is resolutely optimistic. “After my short seminar, nobody will go for 14 days without being kissed,” says Senftleben.

The seminar was part of a “soft skills” course that the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) is offering to 440 IT engineer students that are completing their master’s degrees. The course is meant to offer the students a chance to improve their social skills, as well as other organizational and management skills that are not part of a conventional academic curriculum.

Other sections include lessons on business etiquette, body language, public speaking, time and stress management and presentation skills. "With our courses, we prepare the students not only for professional life but also for their everyday social lives," said HPI Director Christoph Meinel in a statement. “With this course, we are facilitating the careers of the students and enhancing their career prospects.”

The methodology of flirting
Having meditated on the process of flirting for a large part of his professional life, Senftleben has a view of flirting that verges on scientific. The biggest misconception about flirting, Senftleben said, is that it is just a romantic instrument. “That is of course not true,” Senftleben said. “It is rather some sort of a language that I teach.”

In Senftleben’s philosophy, flirting has a methodology – it something that we can figure out and study. Senftleben’s focus differentiates him from a field that is usually intent on detaching love from other arenas and wrapping it in a shroud of Hallmark mystery and generalised platitudes. For Senftleben, flirting is not just a means toward romantic happiness; it is a central tenet of all communication, be it business, social or otherwise.

Flirting is “not gender-dependent and is not always sexually colored,” Senftleben explains on his website. “Rather, it is an interpersonal communication system based on empathy and verbal-based semantic exactitude. Flirting is a key to any form of success for people and for business.”

Flirting leads to success, said Senftleben, because it is something that increases the “harmony of a conversation.” It is a mode of relating that, through winning somebody over, helps build warmth and trust, thereby advancing the flirter’s interests. “Flirting can’t be disillusioned by knowledge and theoretical considerations, just like love,” he said. “Rather, it is the pleasure in the art of the substantial communication that increases. It is simply great fun because you get kindness and friendliness back.”

Thus, the hope that Senftleben offers is perhaps more tangible than other experts or advice books. His seminar is not necessarily about how to find your soulmate or how to make yourself more attractive to others. Rather, he offers the chance for his students to learn how to better connect with others. Whether you’re an IT geek or a practiced seductress, Senftleben argues, you could still benefit from learning about the inner workings of successful communication. “Anyone can learn to flirt,” Senftleben said, and everybody needs to.

Baby don’t hurt me, no more
Conventional market wisdom would have it that this economy of eros has arisen to meet certain needs. Our lifestyles have changed and we have less time for conventional social interactions, so speed dating and flirting teachers become popular. Similarly, living in more urbanised and possibly alienating environments makes online dating an attractive way to meet people, as it lets you seek out people that share the same interests as you from the comfort of your own home.

Yet, what is often easy to forget is that these tools are also changing our ideas about love. Rather than just passive instruments, they actually shape what we look for. Services such as JDate promote the benefits of intrafaith dating. Speed dating reinforces the idea that first impressions are the most important and that you can accurately judge a prospective partner in five to eight minutes. Self-help books often play into the fantasy of the one, true soul mate that is waiting out there to be found.     

Presenting themselves as helpful options, these tools help define what love looks like and what we think love should look like. The market, after all, cannot simply sell us a simple avenue to love (“just, y’know, wait around and one day, it’ll happen”) – it needs to constantly change the goal posts so we will keep consuming. It needs to come up with, say, a new strategy for how to find love or an innovative, new dating service that will guarantee you happiness. This market force means changing what we look for in love and even, in the end, changing what love means.

In the face of these developments, the significant argument to be made is not whether these services are good or bad but, rather, how are we going to deal with them? What is missing in this economy of eros is a deeper awareness of our relationship to it. We need to start asking questions about how the market and larger culture of love around us is affecting our views of love. The market does shape us and we would do better to recognise it. Perhaps too, this awareness would lead us to more often answer that question, what is love, in our own, individual ways.

Jessica Dorrance/Expatica

Photo credit: tjriley82