Rationalization of Intimacy

Rationalization of Intimacy names the process by which neoliberal culture subjects the domain of personal life — desire, love, attachment, sexuality — to the same utilitarian-pragmatic logic that governs economic and instrumental reason. As theorized in Ruti's corpus (mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life), this rationalization does not simply impose external norms onto an otherwise free sphere; it colonizes the very structure of longing, converting what might function as genuine intersubjective encounter or irreducible desire into a site of managed optimization, performance, and "quick fixes." Happiness scripts, gender stereotypes, and prescriptive romantic templates operate as ideological apparatuses that promise fulfillment while systematically foreclosing the conditions under which desire, in the Lacanian sense, could actually be sustained — that is, as a movement organized around lack rather than its elimination.

The concept is closely tied to the biopolitical disciplining of bodies (particularly female bodies), which are enrolled in normative femininity as the price of romantic eligibility. This rationalization functions as a form of cruel optimism: subjects remain attached to the very promises — of love, coupledom, domestic happiness — whose pursuit perpetuates their suffering. Coping mechanisms such as addiction or compulsive eating are read not as mere pathologies but as micro-resistances to this administered intimacy, symptomatic remainders of a jouissance the system simultaneously produces and prohibits. The rationalization of intimacy thus operates at the junction of ideology and jouissance: it is a social-discursive formation that channels and manages enjoyment, installing the superego's command to optimize one's romantic life in the place formerly occupied by the open question of desire.

This concept appears twice within a single source — mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life — and functions as a diagnostic category that threads through Ruti's broader critique of neoliberal affective life. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. Most directly, it specifies how Ideology operates in the intimate sphere: rather than simply producing false consciousness about politics or economics, ideology here penetrates the very texture of desire and attachment, making the rationalized love-script feel like natural common sense. The concept also extends Cruel Optimism into the domain of romantic and sexual life: the subject's attachment to normative intimacy persists precisely because the form of life promised (coupledom, romantic fulfillment, normative femininity) cannot deliver on its promise, yet the attachment itself is sustained by that very failure.

In relation to Jouissance, the rationalization of intimacy illustrates the superego's command to "Enjoy!" — but now in its neoliberal variant: optimize your relationships, fix your body, perform the correct gender, and enjoyment will follow. This command simultaneously produces surplus-jouissance (in the symptomatic forms of compulsive eating, addiction, dissatisfaction) and pathologizes it, reproducing the very bad feelings it claims to cure. In relation to Anxiety, one can infer that the rationalization of intimacy functions defensively: by filling intimate life with scripts and procedures, it papers over the constitutive lack — the gap that sustains genuine desire — that would otherwise generate the anxiety of genuine encounter with the Other's opacity. The concept is thus less an extension of any single canonical than a synthetic application of Ideology, Cruel Optimism, Jouissance, and Anxiety to the specific terrain of intimate life under neoliberalism.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday LifeMari Ruti · 2018 (p.100)

it's part and parcel of the rationalization of intimacy that characterizes our neoliberal society. It's a quick fix that doesn't actually fix anything.

The phrase "quick fix that doesn't actually fix anything" is theoretically loaded because it captures the structural logic of cruel optimism — the promise of resolution that reproduces the problem — while "rationalization of intimacy" names the specific ideological operation: the colonization of desire by an instrumental, efficiency-oriented logic that treats the irreducible complexity of the Other as a problem to be managed rather than a relation to be sustained.