Our Western fixation on romance goes back to the Middle Ages, when tales of courtly love featured erotic, often illicit desire in which emotional torment could lead to spiritual attainment. Idolization was the key to intensity. Tellingly, salvation came through the lover rather than the church — the first sign of a displacement that haunts romance to this day.
Then, as capitalism emerged, the focus of romantic narratives expanded from gallantry and vassalage to individualism and self-realization. A decline in the belief in immortality led to the emphasis that rapture must be found on earth. The unusual idea that marriage should be based on powerful romantic attraction began to take hold.
The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century locked people into repetitive, uninspiring jobs, which increased their desire for instant pleasures and consumption. As workers moved from country to city, people were less likely to marry according to custom or life-long acquaintance. Instead, they sought romantic attraction in strangers. Capitalism, as it progressed, directed attention to the new and original. The idea was that people could reinvent themselves through the ownership of external objects: a wardrobe, a house or even a person in the form of a love object. Possession of an attractive lover provided the possibility of transformation and escape from the lonely anonymity of the urban crowd.
Indeed, commodity fetishism (the idea that the subjects of a capitalist commodity-producing economy are characterized by “freedom, equality, property, and Bentham”) both presumes and gives rise to particular notions of love and romance.
Parramore then connects this modern notion to addiction.
A market-driven society built on self-interest fosters an exploitative urge and constantly reinforces the illusory promises of what we can obtain. Like the gambler who imagines that she is just a play away from riches and will beat the house despite the odds, the love addict dreams of complete security and ever-lasting euphoria. When the lie is exposed, the addict goes frantically running after the next object, who is always just a computer click or text message away.
This notion of addition complicates the idea that, as modern peoples, we have become free (e.g., in comparison to arranged marriages) to choose our partners. Yes, capitalism was accompanied by the birth of new freedoms (including that of romantic partners). But then it turns those freedoms into addictions: not only the addiction of love, but also of working for a wage or salary.
It is precisely in that sense that, within capitalism, we become forced to have the freedom to love external objects. And to sell our ability to work to someone else.
It’s also why we are forced to imagine and create a different realm of freedom—both romantic and economic.
occasional links & commentary 
This all sounds pretty much right to me, but I cannot claim to understand all of the details. One key idea I get from all of it is that love becomes more superficial, and so people become frustrated instead of satisfied by their erotic relationships. But if it is the superficiality that is the source of the frustration, changing partners won’t solve the problem. I guess it’s like addiction insofar as increasing doses are needed to get the same effect, and satisfaction diminishes. And I guess you are saying that “commodity fetishism” is a way of thinking that guarantees what I’m calling superficiality; one imagines one’s self free because one’s choice of a partner is not constrained by social convention (which is analogous to the ‘freedom’ to sell one’s labor where one is not tied to a particular feudal lord or land). As if that were enough to make the relationship worthwhile. But apart from any false consciousness or confused thinking, I would have thought the degrading nature of most work is by itself enough to wear people out so they have very little left over to dedicate to a fulfilling relationship with another person. All this for me just raises the question of whether there can so much as be a fulfilling relationship under capitalism. (And I imagine that I am only thereby re-discovering an old question.) Then again, I get the idea that it is the very naturalness of the desire for a genuine connection, unsatisfied at work, which provokes the yearning once the workday is over. But that’s not addiction. It’s merely an original unsatisfied yearning.
After reading this post, I went back to that essay I wrote for your class, more or less one year ago. It reminds me that I probably need to re-read McCloskey, now with more time to digest it (well, I guess I should do the exact same with Capital). I do recall she was able to make a somewhat compelling argument for love in capitalism, though as I mentioned in my essay, her concept of love seemed radically different from the idea of love as self-giving (agape), and more like the idea of the “eros”, which one [I] could argue, is a better “conceptualization” of desire than it is of love.
Also, can we get any better of a blatant example of eros-commodification than the recent Ashley Madison scandal? Calling it now, at least one of your students will write about this one this semester.