Modern Impediments to Romance
Why dating is, according to my single friends, "a total shit-show."
Romance is typically considered an ethereal thing. A not-entirely-corporeal consideration. While we grant some power for mundane things like timing and location to affect it, we also assume an untouchable remainder: something existing beyond, beneath, or between the circumstances.
This presumed ethereality explains why some people will undoubtedly shrug their shoulders at my main argument in this essay, which is that the modern dating environment is a major threat to romance. My guess is that the average person is willing to concede that yes, dating apps can be tiresome, and sure, the whole process nowadays can be a bit daunting; but love, in the end, is like a flower that bursts through concrete: it cannot be kept down by even the most hostile conditions.
But why are we tolerating—even creating—hostile conditions? Don’t flowers grow better in a meadow?
Let’s set all that aside for the moment and look the current situation square in the face. In a mere 30 years, the dating environment has changed so much that it is unrecognizable to its former self.1 According to the optimists, the transition to dating apps has allowed for a more efficient process in which the consumer can forego those cringy moments—like being set up by an aunt, or hit on by some creep at the bar—and proceed directly to everlasting love and happiness: all for just a few dollars a month. But is this true?
I don’t think so.
Specifically, I believe that three changes have made the search for romance less satisfying and effective. First, there is too much choice. Secondly, the process itself has become shortened in areas where it is better long, and lengthened in areas where it is better short. Finally, romance has become far too conscious, when it really grows best in the shadows of our attention and control. This post will explore how each of these changes has affected the dating environment’s presumable goal of helping people find love.
By the way, what are my credentials for writing about this topic? Well, I put my phone down for a few hours and thought about it. Surely, in this day and age, that will do.
Too much choice.
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz describes his experience with blue jeans. He bought a few pairs a long time ago, you see, that served him well but eventually wore out, so he was in the market for some new ones. When he went to the store, he was given a crash course on jean evolution during the time he’d been living under a rock, and became predictably overwhelmed. This caused him to do a lot of research on choice and write a book about his findings.
I had a similar experience recently with vacuum cleaners. For the longest time I didn’t have a vacuum cleaner because I was living on hardwoods, but my new place has some carpet. Initially, I had the naïve idea that I would find a vacuum cleaner that a) worked and b) didn’t break the bank. Fifteen minutes into my search, I was asking myself deep questions about how much I valued components that, fifteen minutes earlier, I didn’t even know existed.
Did I want a dual-setting for carpets and hardwood? (I do have both.) How long should the cord be? Should I purchase the warranty? (I’ve never broken a vacuum cleaner before, but then again, I wouldn’t know where to take it if I did.) Should I get a quieter model? (The noise has never bothered me, but it might when we have kids…) Should it be eco-friendly?
It was enough to make me want to have dirty floors forever.
All choices, even the ones that feel most personal, are made within a context that is itself an actor in the decision—both in the moment and in retrospect. Dating has not been immune to the broader changes in modern society which have created more choice than people generally know what to do with. My sense is that most people looking for romantic partnership have the same attitude I had toward vacuum cleaners—they just want one that works—but before they know it, find themselves evaluating the extent to which height, college education, religious background, sexual identity, astrological sign, preferred pronouns, and most provocatively, political orientation factor into the equation.
Does any of this stuff matter? Not really. I mean, even as recently as 30 years ago, when people had a fraction of this information upfront, they somehow managed to fall and stay in love. But now that the information is there—unfront and personal—people cannot help but use it in their decision-making process, even when they know, in a different part of their conscious brain, that it’s largely irrelevant.
Not only do dating apps provide too much partner information, they also provide too many partners—especially for those living in or near a city. Thousands of potential matches await, with more coming online every day, leading to what one of my friends described as “a habit of waiting for something better.” But surely the promise of future options undermines the value of present ones, no? I mean, much as we may not want to admit it—because of love’s supposed transcendental nature—choosing a partner is still subject to the rules of choice. The main rule of choice is choose the best option, meaning best is not absolute; it is relative to the other options. And if more options will be available tomorrow, why not wait a bit? If multiple options are available now, why not juggle some?
Hell, people on a date can sometimes feel their phone buzzing with more matches. In the bathroom, they can see a slew of messages from other potential partners. How can this not smudge the shine of the person they are with?2 The time to make one’s case is also shrinking. In your date’s pocket are other present options and plenty more future ones. If you don’t show your quality this very instant, the moment will be gone.
The constant availability of potentially more appealing partners has other ramifications. It tends to incentivize the sort of behavior that is, at the risk of sounding like the New England snob I am, rude. Scheduling multiple dates at a time and choosing at the last moment the one that seems most promising. Dating multiple people at once until explicitly asked to stop. Posting photos that aren’t indicative of your current appearance. Come on, man. But the dating-app environment not only fails to punish this—it rewards it. Decency, in a word, comes at a high opportunity cost. This leads to an exhausting, dispiriting experience, the kind that my friends and clients routinely need a break from.
Finally, in addition to sifting through too much personal information and too many matches, daters must also choose which kind of relationship they are seeking. I imagine this prompt causes many people to react in the same way as Schwartz when he was asked for his preferred kind of jean: “I just want…the kind that used to be the only kind.”3 More choice is great for the small percentage of people who have particular preferences and desires. More cuts of jeans are great for those who really care about jeans. For the rest of us, more choice is plain-old overwhelming. We just want the kind that used to be the only kind—you know, the kind that provided meaningful, romantic connection. What kind is that?
There is another complication to deciding a priori what kind of relationship you want: the other person. I mean, doesn’t what we want from a relationship often depend on the person with whom we are having it? This is why phrases like “marriage material” or “great in bed, not much upstairs” exist.
Of course, many people come to the apps with a specific goal in mind, whether to have fun or find a long-term partner, and communicating that upfront can be beneficial. But what happens when you are “just looking for fun” and end up meeting “marriage material”? Or when you indicate that you’re “looking for something serious” and then meet someone really fun? More heartbreak, I’m guessing. Having to decide and signal your intentions upfront removes some of the wiggle room that was traditionally inherent in the process (something to which we will also return later).
Together, all these dynamics of choice contribute to a final, key point Schwartz has found in his research. Back when there were only three kinds of jeans at our local store and none of them fit just-so, we blamed “the world” for not providing us with a viable option. But now, with so much choice, if we come home with a pair that doesn’t fit perfectly, we blame ourselves. I hope the same thing isn’t happening to those who haven’t quite found the right relationship yet, but I have to imagine that in many cases, it is.
As an American, I can say with some authority that our culture’s knee-jerk reaction is to celebrate and agitate for more optionality across pretty much every domain of life. Perhaps this instinct is even stronger when the choice in question is among the most, if not the most, important of our lives. In my opinion, this attitude has gone well past the point of being helpful, and has in fact become actively harmful in the realm of dating.
Disruption of the Natural Cadence.
The agita of more choice might be worthwhile if outcomes were improved. In theory, more partner information upfront, more partners to choose from, and more relationship styles to experiment with, could lead to more positive results. Does it?
Not really. The research shows that dating apps improve the matching problem: in other words, they put more single people in touch. But as for those fancy algorithms the dating apps are always blathering on about, it’s just smoke and mirrors. In fact, to the extent that algorithms help, it’s by the placebo effect. People who believe that an algorithm will find them a good match tend to report more satisfaction with their matches. Go figure. But algorithms don’t contain any special insight regarding what constitutes romantic connection. They haven’t any predictability. The indefinable “spark” remains indefinable.
Now, I don’t want to downplay how easy apps have made it for single people in a given area to connect with one another. Access was an issue in the past, and apps have largely solved that. At the same time: “Larger human mating pools are associated with different mate choice heuristics and lower satisfaction with choice.”4 So, when people have access to more partners, they use different criteria to judge what a good partner is and are less happy with their choice. Do apps really represent a net improvement of the situation then?
It’s not only what information is provided, either. It is also a matter of when. My second critique is that the apps have disrupted what I will risk calling “the natural cadence of romance.” The dating process has been shortened in areas where it is better lengthened, and lengthened in areas it is better shortened. The first way this happens is by providing too much information upfront.
The build-up.
In the dating-app world, the journey begins with a bunch of information that, as we’ve seen, doesn’t matter. More specifically, the information that is provided is not a good proxy for whether there will be romantic chemistry, which is what most people care about. But the information does matter to the extent that it can bridge those awkward and uncomfortable first dates.
Yet dating apps have unceremoniously punctured this life raft by requiring a CV upfront. The average date:
“Do you have any siblings? Oh right, your profile said you have two sisters.”
“Yes, and you have a brother?”
“Correct.”
What are we doing? Why would we take what is destined to be the most fragile and awkward period of a relationship and remove its support? We’re basically asking people to start a fire with flint and steel.
In the early stage of a relationship, conversation benefits from vacillating between light and heavy, personal and casual. The conversation is like two people pulling opposite ends of a saw, cutting a log of unfamiliarity in half. If the connection is there, this can be a sublime experience. I mean, it is basically the process of falling in love, and what could be better? Yet we jeopardize this needlessly by forcing people to find other material with which to build familiarity.
After a while, people even come to require this information upfront—to their own detriment.5 The other day, a friend told me, she was walking to work when someone with a cute dog bumped into her and began a conversation. She thought him handsome and funny, and he asked for her number. Before giving it to him, though, she wanted to know a few things: his religious background, his political orientation, whether he lived at home, and whether he had been to therapy. In retelling the story, my friend said: “I’m used to having all this information on the apps, so if I’m going to say yes to someone IRL, I at least need some of it.” It’s not a crazy notion by any means, but it does go to show just how much we expect to know about someone before we meet them, and how little room there is for the process of coming-to-know.
Isn’t a little mystery valuable in and of itself though, beyond any support it might provide in early conversations? Throughout history, lovers have poured their imagination into the space left by not knowing everything about a romantic interest. How many books, poems, paintings, songs, and general human activity are the product of romanticization? Are specifically based on that period of learning (and maybe fantasizing a bit) about who the other is? Do we really want to take that away, much as we may hate uncertainty otherwise?
The come-down.
Another part of the relationship that is best given as much time as possible is the high from our last rendezvous. Maybe this explains why, even today, we seem to be tickled by those periods in human history when love was expressed through letters that took weeks to exchange, and meetings were often separated by months and hard miles. We intuitively recognize that these forms of absence made the heart grow fonder.
The world used to contain negative space (he said in his best imitation of a grumpy old man). There was once slack in the tide of love. Such long, flat periods between meeting required resolve and commitment, and served as a foundation for the relationship’s future. But no longer. Now, a relationship must remain piping-hot continuously, otherwise it teeters and falls. Part of this has to do with the constant availability of alternatives, but another part has to do with the nature of modern communication.
Two-hundred years ago, a person could nurse a special time with a prospective lover for months, until they saw them or heard from them again. (Hell, they could write a novella or opera in the interim, and often did.) Thirty years ago, there was an unwritten rule of waiting three days before calling.6 Twenty years ago, it was common to go a day without hearing from someone and not think anything of it. 10 years ago, it was common to go a workday without hearing from someone, and not fret. Now, it seems that around four hours of silence has pretty much signaled a death knell.
The fact that communication is more or less a steady drip means that the period of savoring—or pining—is all but gone. As soon as people send a message now, they transition into one of the more dreadful states of existence: awaiting a reply. In the past, when letters were a thing, a person could at the very least revel in their romance for a bit, knowing delay was inherent. It might have taken a few weeks for the insidious possibility that the other person’s feelings had changed to enter a lover’s mind. Now, it might enter their mind about a minute after sending a text. And not to beat a dead horse, but the ease of alternatives makes a change of heart more likely. What a shit-show!
The before and aftermath.
Other stages of romance are best truncated as much as possible, including stages that would never have existed in the past, such as evaluating whether to meet up with someone based on their profile and often an interminable messaging period. What is the idea here? Not only, as we’ve noted, are we burning through potential get-to-know-you material, but we’re also just wasting clock. How much can you really learn about a person by messaging back and forth before meeting? You don’t even know their mannerisms enough to discern the spirit of many of their texts! Just meet them and get it over with, no?
But that’s not what the apps want. No, they want all your time, forever. And in many ways they have succeeded, from offering lower rates for longer subscriptions, to hosting their own messaging systems replete with ‘online now’ and read receipt features.7
A final stage that is best abandoned as soon as possible is, well, the final one. Undoubtedly, a break-up is a pain unto itself, one that people can take many years to get over. One thing that helps, as everyone knows, is time. But it’s not just any time, is it? Surely it’s time away from the pain-inducing stimulus? If you roll your ankle and your doctor says “Give it time,” they don’t mean that you should go play tennis every day and in a month you’ll be better. Yet, sadly, the modern dating environment—well, really, the modern world—has made this incredibly difficult. It used to be that after you broke up with someone, you’d rarely see them again except for in the most unfortunate circumstances, like if they were a coworker or neighbor. Those circumstances are pretty much everyone’s circumstances now, given online presences. People can work around this, but it’s hard, and plenty don’t.
An odd example of being more in touch with a person than you might want is observing their profile changes as or after you date. Perhaps you think it’s going well and that the relationship is on its way to becoming more serious, but then you notice the other person is online quite a bit. And has added more photos. Hm, what does that mean? Likewise, when the relationship is over, you have the misfortune of being able to see the ways in which their profile has changed—maybe in response to what it was like dating you? “Looking for someone who has their life together.” “Hoping to find intellectual and physical chemistry with someone.” Woof.
Besides more pain and less pleasure, what is the net effect of dating being lengthened in some areas and shortened in others by the apps? I would submit that it’s made the process more exhausting and all-consuming; more like a job. The potentially-exhilarating, always-anxious early period of the relationship is pre-empted and undercut by knowing the person’s grandmother’s middle name before meeting them—if, that is, they pass your four-stage interviewing process and are granted a fifteen-minute coffee date. If the date goes well, you have about three hours before you begin to gnaw over whether they thought the date went well. They haven’t texted in that time, after all, never mind that it’s during business hours. If they do text, you can savor a sweet feeling of joy for about two minutes, before it turns to acid in your mouth.
But don’t worry—if it is indeed over, you can still check in on them as often as you want, just to see how well they’re doing without you. Ugh.
Too Bright a Light
My third complaint is that dating apps shine too bright a light on romance—in other words, they provide far too much conscious control in a process that benefits from a light touch.
Somewhat like encountering a grizzly bear in the wild, it turns out you don’t want to look a prospective partner directly in the face. It is much better to observe them (and be observed) out of the corner of your eye.8
How many movies rely on this implicit truth by arranging for two characters to share a circumstance that demands their joint attention? Their plane crashes on a desert island, they get assigned to the same work team, they’re forced to live together under Nazi rule, or whatever. We cannot seriously be fooled into thinking that the characters fall in love solely because they are “right” for each other. No, a big part of romance results from the opportunity to get a good look at the other person with your peripheral vision, while your main focus is on something else. This applies to the audience, as well. We like when romance is developed as part and parcel to a larger and more pressing plot. When romance is the plot, we often become bored.
Most of us know this by our own experience, too. It’s much easier to develop romantic feelings for classmates or colleagues. If this were not the case, we’d much more faithfully follow the advice to avoid workplace romances, which all else being equal are a horrible idea. But as Jim tells Michael in The Office, the office is a great place to get to know someone.
Instead of allowing romance to build, however, slowly and in the shadows—a bit like dough in a covered bowl—dating apps make it front and center. While this solves the matching problem to some extent—you’re looking, I’m looking, let’s chat—it also removes the ambiguity that makes romance, and especially flirting, fun. People who meet on dating apps never have the chance to fantasize about their partner from afar, never come to know them as a byproduct of something else, never establish a deep connection before a romantic turn, never see other people covet them, or any of that. They never get to hip-check each other away from the lab instructions as my high school girlfriend and I did for a few sultry months before grabbing ice-cream.
Instead, with the apps, it’s boom. Lights on, intense scrutiny. Are you the one?
Romance was potentially everywhere once; now it’s behind a lock-screen and paid subscription. To the extent that there is a “time and place” for romance, other times and place disappear. I’ve heard that it’s borderline unacceptable to hit on someone in the meatworld these days. Doesn’t that seem sad and pathetic? I don’t know, I liked romance as a cage-free animal.
And in addition to benefitting from the open air, doesn’t romance profit by being social, too? Don’t we fall in love with people by how they behave in groups, as we watch them without any pressure of a decision? In an odd way, the group helps us make the decision. But only individuals can make decisions on the apps, at least for now, which makes romance more like a business transaction involving two people—and a mountain of due diligence—and less of an organic group process. The early relationship must somehow survive this individual period before it can withstand the group, rather than the other way around. Surely this is a tall order, a significant burden to put on sapling relationship?
In many different ways, actually, modern relationships have to survive the beginning stage without their ancient supports.
For some things, like saving for retirement, conscious control is good. For other things, like breathing, using a certain word many times in a row, and perhaps romance, conscious control just gets in the way.
Love is an autonomic process, I think.9 It happens mostly outside our conscious awareness. That is why applying too much direct attention can lead to what psychologists call “ironic errors” and the rest of us call “overthinking it.” Directly evaluating someone off-the-bat for their potential as a romantic partner, using mounds of data that is unlikely to help, is a good example.
Which brings us back to choice. The information we are given tempts us into overthinking it. The apps provide rope and the average person hangs themselves with it. For example, a heterosexual woman might think that she could not possibly date a man under 5’8”, so she removes such men from her profile search. Or a heterosexual male filter for brunettes. This is dumb, yes, but the people doing this sort of thing aren’t. That’s the problem.
I believe there is a magical, irreducible, and yes, even ethereal quality to love. A quality that has thus far befuddled our clumsy and superficial attempts to understand it. Hell, when I first met my wife, I chose her friend over her. If her friend hadn’t rejected me, I never would have found the happiest relationship of my life. And I am not alone in owing my happiness to serendipity. But such serendipity finds little room to operate in the individual-driven, choice-rich, ultra-conscious world of dating apps.
Follow the Incentives
Fifty years ago, nobody was monetizing romance anywhere near to the degree that is happening now. Sure, Hallmark made a killing on Valentine’s Day, as did flower shops and restaurants. And there were matchmaking services for the few who could afford it. Plus jewelry and so forth. But all that is incomparable to the fact that the majority of people now use an app to find romantic or sexual partners.
That being said, don’t the majority of people use technology to learn languages, or figure out transportation? It’s not just romance that has undergone a technological transition. In fact, to put modern dating into a broader context, we can see that it’s not unique in many of the complaints and concerns I have mentioned here. It is merely one instance of the more general trends of a) providing people with more choice than they know what to do with and b) bringing more aspects of our lives under technology’s control.
What’s driving these trends? Money.
Capitalism, for lack of a better word, is constantly looking for problems that it can solve. And to its credit, it probably solves those problems better than alternate forms of economic arrangement. The invisible hand and all that. An issue arises, though, when capitalism begins creating problems so that it can then solve them. Romance, I would argue, was one such “problem.” Sure, there were downsides to dating in the past, don’t get me wrong, but I certainly wouldn’t have said they were significant enough to warrant a wholesale change. Yet that is what happened, and why? Because there was a tremendous amount of money to it. Specifically, there was a tremendous amount of money in convincing people that the old ways of dating were insufficient.
To me, romance falls into a different category than something like ride-share services. Uber and Lyfy have addressed far more palpable problems, such as the cost of car ownership and the prevalence of drunk driving. Dating apps, on the other hand, might have actually made the pursuit of romance more difficult, in addition to more expensive. But our economic system does not discriminate. Both Uber and Bumble have been amazing successes in its eyes.
In addition to fixing something that may not have been broken, dating apps have perverse incentives. With ride-share services, such as Uber, the incentives of the company, employees (drivers), and customers are largely aligned. That’s not the case with dating apps, and we see this most clearly in the pricing structure. Users have the option to pay a lower montly rate if they sign up for an entire year. Does this make any sense from the user’s perspective, though? I mean, isn’t the goal of the app to get off it?
Recognizing this tension, Hinge tried to lean into it by declaring itself as an app “designed to be deleted.” They also try to convince users that they have “an acclaimed Nobel-Prize-winning algorithm.” Lol, nice try.
The fact of the matter is that the incentives won’t be aligned—for any app—until the underlying economics change. Since the tech-industry relies on a time-based economy, the goal is for users to spend as much time as possible on a product, even when you pay for the product and aren’t the product yourself. Critics of this arrangement, e.g. Tristan Harris, have pointed out that the net effect of this model is to, um, waste people’s time. But this model becomes even more awkward with dating apps, because unlike a positive experience with Netflix, which may encourage a user to watch another movie or show, a positive experience with a dating app means the app is unnecessary.
Thus, the app’s goal is to thread the needle between being so awful at what it does that people give up on it wholesale, and so effective that it jettisons its customer base before extracting their money. In my opinion, dating apps have threaded this needle marvelously.
Conclusion
We live in a brave new world now. There’s no hiding from the changes that technology has ushered in. No going back. Because dating is only one instance of a much broader trend, people ought to be prepared.
Technology will continue to use its foothold in cultural life to push for more. For exampe, why can’t a dating app help you meet friends, too? What about adding another partner to your partnership, or giving ethical nonmonogamy a try? If the apps aren’t actively driving these trends, they will at least be quite pleased by them.
My advice to someone looking for romance—and not a crusade—is this: find your own creative solutions to the problems I outlined above. Things are not nearly so dire in the modern moment that there isn’t room for creative workarounds. It’s just that you can’t be a passenger anymore and expect to be happy. A sentiment that goes well beyond dating.
References
Katiyar, T., Hunt, A., Chaudhary, N., & Jaeggi, A. (2023). An Antidote to Overpathologizing Computer-Mediated Communication: An Evolutionary Perspective on Mixed Effects of Mismatch. PsyArXiv Preprints, (3 Oct 2023).
Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York.
Put another way, a person coming out of a 30-year relationship is more likely to be held back by their former dating experience than served by it.
As Katiyar et al argue, the simultaneous juggling of multiple mates leads to a much lower threshold for moving on (pg 18). This is simply a dynamic of choice, and would apply to someone in the market for oranges just as much as for someone in the market for love. When alternatives are not as easy to come by, people naturally try harder to make present options viable.
“I want a pair of jeans—32–28,” I said. “Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” she replied. “Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?” I was stunned. A moment or two later I sputtered out something like, “I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind.”
Katiyar et al (2023), pg. 17.
A common theme throughout this essay is that if you give people enough rope to hang themselves, they will. So don’t give it to them.
I base this and all my impressions of what dating was like before I was born on All the Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.
Offering a lower per-month rate for a longer membership is a particularly perverse incentive, which we’ll return to later.
A pet theory of mine is that people’s tendency (especially women’s) to look away when they are being ogled is a deep and ancient acknowledgement of the basic posture of romance. In my not-by-any-means-extensive experience of checking women out, I’ve noticed that even when women are welcoming of my gaze, they will look away so I can look closer. Of course, as soon as they turn toward me, I turn away.
The autonomic nervous system is a component of the peripheral nervous system that regulates involuntary physiologic processes including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sexual arousal. It contains three anatomically distinct divisions: sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric.