Introduction

There’s a line in Queen and David Bowie’s 1981 anthem “Under Pressure” that sociologists of intimacy would do well to sit with: love is called an “old-fashioned word,” and yet the song insists that love dares us, dares us to care about people on the margins, dares us to change how we relate to ourselves and others. The word “dares” is carrying a huge load. It shows love not as a simple feeling, but as a risk, as a demand, as an inconvenience you choose to accept. This essay argues that modern love has been quietly reconfigured around ease, when its sociological and historical nature was always founded in inconvenience and the friction, protractedness, vulnerability, and the deliberate investment of time and labour in another person. I want to trace how convenience culture has emptied the inconvenient core out of love, drawing on the sociology of intimacy and the critique of commodification under capitalism. I also want to trace how this same logic teaches us to erase the human labour of the servers, the cooks, the invisible hands behind the experiences we now consume rather than share.

Love as a Historical Inconvenience

Sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Eva Illouz have long argued that romantic love as a modern ideal was never supposed to be smooth sailing. Giddens’ concept of the ‘pure relationship’ defines intimacy as something that exists only in terms of constant, effortful negotiation, a relationship not held together by external obligation, but by the ongoing, inconvenient work of choosing someone, again and again. Illouz goes further, demonstrating in Consuming the Romantic Utopia that the emotional ideal of love has always been linked to sacrifice: courtship rituals, letters, waiting, the risk of rejection, the labour of showing up. Love, in this interpretation, is not a passive state into which one falls, but an active practice one performs, often at self-sacrifice. Inconvenience is not incidental to love; it is constitutive of it. To love someone was to re-engineer your schedule, your resources, your emotional bandwidth around a person who couldn’t just be optimised away.

The Rise of Handy Love

What we are seeing now, I argue, is the replacement of this inconvenient practice with a convenient product. Dating apps reduce courtship to a swipe; algorithmic matching provides compatibility without the labour of discovery; “situationships” provide intimacy without the trouble of commitment. Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid love” captures this change very well: in liquid modernity, relationships are designed to be entered into and exited with minimal friction, because friction, the thing that once signified depth, has come to be experienced as a cost rather than a feature. We want more and more the effective payoff of love (validation, comfort, companionship) without its historical precondition (sustained inconvenience, risk and time). This is less a moral failing of individuals than a structural adaptation: when everything else in daily life has been engineered for frictionlessness, food delivered in minutes, entertainment delivered on demand, information delivered instantly, it would be strange if intimacy alone remained resistant to that logic.

The Commodification of Feeling and Capitalism

Capitalism here is not a background but the organising grammar of the shift. Illouz’s later work on “emotional capitalism” argues that the rationality of the market has migrated into the emotional realm itself: We now rate partners the way we rate products, optimising for efficiency, minimising “wasted” time, and treating incompatibility as a defect to be filtered out rather than a difference to be negotiated. Convenience is not a neutral value; it is the preferred value of capitalism, because convenience is what can be monetised, scaled, and sold back to us as a service. Love that requires inconvenient hours, long walks, long arguments, long silences, showing up for somebody at 2 a.m. is not easily packaged into an app or a subscription. Love that can promise frictionless satisfaction can.

The Work Behind the Disappearing Convenience

My second argument is a development of this criticism, and I think it is worth thinking about: how often do we sit down with the person who cooked our meal or thank the waiter who brought it to our table instead of simply enjoying the convenience of “food arriving”? This is not a side point; this is the same sociological mechanism working. Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism describes exactly this: the social relations and the labour behind a product are rendered invisible by the time the product reaches the consumer, who experiences only the finished convenience, devoid of its human origin. We tap an app interface, not look a server in the eye. We rate a delivery, not the driver. And the same fetishism happens in love: We consume the feeling of being wanted, of being matched, or comforted, while the labour of someone’s actual time, vulnerability, and effort recedes into the background, abstracted into a “like,” a message, a convenient gesture. Either way, capitalism teaches us to relate to the product of care, while remaining strangers to its deliverer.

Conclusion: Daring to Be Inconvenienced Again

“Under Pressure” doesn’t end in despair, but in a plea — a demand that we give love, and each other, one more try, precisely because love is hard, old-fashioned, and inconvenient by design. Sociologically, the song is a protest against the very convenience culture this essay describes. To “dare to care,” as Bowie and Mercury put it, is to take on the risk that convenience culture trains us to avoid. If the sociological essence of love was always time, inconvenience freely given with no guarantee of return, presence offered with no algorithmic filters, labour recognised rather than erased, then reclaiming it might demand a conscious rejection of inconvenience itself: to sit longer at the table, to ask the cook their name, to take the harder, slower, more human road back to each other.

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Paul Thomas is a Research Scholar in the Department of Sociology at South Asian University (SAU), New Delhi.