What if I don't want a public relationship?
When self-promotion conflicts with love, which comes first?
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The question of love versus career and independence is timeless, but it looks different these days than ever before. We are in an inescapable era of self-promotion. Many who want to make a decent living as an entrepreneur, a small business owner, or an artist, for example, might have to self-promote. And those who aren’t self-promoting are probably consuming the content of the self-promoters.
Over the last few years, social media has gone from a place for select “influencers” to share products, to a place that is necessary for anyone to market what they do. Because of this, I have often recently wondered: when self-promotion conflicts with love, which comes first?
Consider this scenario: a man is contacted by a production company–through his Bumble dating profile–to participate in a dating reality television show. He has several conversations resembling auditions…but then he meets the woman who would become his girlfriend. They start dating seriously, and he does not hear from the production company or from the show for several months. He stops thinking about the show, as he is busy falling in love.
When this woman moves in with him, he is suddenly (after months of radio silence) contacted by the production company. They want him to proceed with psychiatric and medical exams–two of the final steps before committing to a dating show with women who are very well-known in the reality television world.
This man is a talented painter. He makes a decent living selling paintings, but supplements that income with a full-time office job that drains him emotionally. So he approaches his girlfriend with the conundrum: he is in love with her, but some publicity would be helpful for name recognition, and it could allow him to quit his soul-sucking job. Most importantly, it could impact the prices of his paintings, and their collective future livelihood. He does not want to be with any other woman, nor does he want her to move out–but this is just a potential pragmatic reality. What does she think?
Another scenario: a woman has an up-and-coming non-profit in the advocacy space. A friend of hers who is a documentarian wants to set her up on a date with an A-list Hollywood actor who is 30 years her senior, and who has extensive connections and interest in her organization. He invites her to a gala at the White House, where they would be photographed publicly. Does she go?
Everyone probably has different opinions about all of this. Would a dating show actually help a painter’s career–or would it backfire horribly, especially with a secret relationship at home? Isn’t it unwise for a young woman to hitch her advocacy group prospects to the brand of a powerful man (and…is he sexually harassing her)? Now that career is becoming more public for many, does this mean that we have to be public with our relationship statuses? Or, do we have to split our public life from our private life, Severance-style?
There are many ways to dissect it. But also, it’s hard to deny that the frequency of these conundrums will only increase–especially as celebrity culture reigns, and as social media becomes the most significant funnel for how future generations will consume information and tap into culture.
I don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution, as people and their relationships can allow for all kinds of different circumstances. Maybe your partner is hands-off, and they are fine with you doing whatever you need to do to promote yourself. Or maybe they are uncomfortable and want to set boundaries with you (not the Jonah Hill type, though). There is probably a middle ground for most. But no matter what, if you have a new relationship with your partner in the year 2024, transparency and communication around self-promotion and publicizing your life is something you might now want to consider.
ICYMI
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