what's up with modern love?

just asking

Shannon Lucy Cartier, Sex After Death, 2019

Girls on my TikTok feed are making “first date series” where they go on 30 or 50 first dates. The conceit of the series, obviously, is that there’s not gonna be enough content if you meet your soulmate right away. Luckily, no one seems to.

Everyone’s on Hinge or Tinder but no one seems to like it. Multiple male friends have told me they don’t want to move to SF because “dating is impossible.” But everyone in New York reports that “no one’s serious about dating until they’re like, 35.” Everyone’s apparently in a situationship and no one enjoys them. Hookup culture is a thing of the past, but casual dating culture isn’t. Apparently we’re not having sex anymore?

20+ years after Carrie Bradshaw announced the death of romance in Manhattan, I have to wonder: is love really over? Surely not, because romance seems to be all anyone I know talks about. After AGI, that is. I meet up with a subscriber at Bar Crudo and she asks me if there are any fictional couples I admire. Having just completed a streak of 19th century Marriage Novels, I admit that all the fictional couples I can think of are sad. She brings up Never Let Me Go. It’s funny, because a friend had just brought up the same book early that day… in the context of a potential apocalypse. Apocalypse and monogamy: the two conversations I can’t seem to get away from. Childhood OCD primed me for a lifetime spent amongst the rationalists—nothing feels as comforting to me as a good theory about the impending end of the world.

The infamous chart! I shudder at the thought of what the 2024 version looks like…

I keep repeating to people who ask: meet people through your friends. Not easy advice to give in a time when people have smaller friend groups, when we “look into people’s eyes through Twitter.” Match Group (owner of OkCupid, Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, among others) has become responsible for everyone’s dating lives simultaneously. I remember being obsessed with Christian Rudder’s blog OkStats in high school. I found it so charming, the idea that you could look at data and come to conclusions about love. Vegans give better blowjobs. More people will message you if you’re polarizing than if you’re universally likable. I was so seduced by the promise that if we just got a little bit more information, we could find everyone their pitch perfect partner…

There’s this joke I like to make, which is that everyone around me is trying to solve physics or intelligence or Something Grand and I’m just trying to solve heterosexual relations. Don’t begrudge me for believing the latter is the harder problem. Every week The Cut finds a new woman to tell us she knows how to have it all so we can laugh at her. But I don’t want my husband to have three other girlfriends and I don’t want him to die 15 years before me. I’m the kind of girl who maintains an iPhone Notes list of all the animals that mate for life… but isn’t that every woman you know? If women are pragmatic, it’s only because they’re forced to be.

If I could go on 30 Hinge dates for the bit, I would. You all will have to excuse me for my laziness. I think about how my friends have met their partners: at a psychedelic retreat in Jamaica. Twitter DMs. Over Facebook Message requests after they met briefly in Japan while he was shooting some kind of promotional video. At a friend’s Christmas party. First day of college. Job interview. Because her group house had geographical proximity to his group house. A hundred fortuitous encounters mediated by the humans around us.

The idealist in me would like to say that being ambitious about platonic love is how you start to be ambitious about everything else, including romantic love. The cynic in me points out there are a thousand and one articles telling people that they should have better friendships and very few telling them how. Just hang out, just touch grass. People are told they should have better ways of meeting people, but practically, they don’t.

When I was 19 the older guy (haha) I was dating told me that he didn’t think that people were biologically designed for serial monogamy. And I’ve come to agree: it doesn’t seem normal, natural, to pour everything into someone for two and a half years, and then stop talking to them afterwards. It doesn’t even seem natural to do that for two months. But again, we seem to have found no better way of dating than attaching and detaching until the right person is found.

I’d like to be a matchmaker but my early experiments suggest that might be substantially harder than writing a Substack. There are a million reasons two people might get not get along and one reason they will (pheromones). People on Twitter post descriptions of why love must be dead… “My friend, 33f, blonde and makes 150k per year at her email job, can’t find anyone to date her…” The divorce rate is going down but so is the birth rate. In 2016, women in San Francisco County became first time mothers at the age of 31.9. (New York and Marin County were second and third, respectively.) Accelerationism is the word of the moment, but when it comes to settling down we seem to take our time.