Finding long-lasting love has become more challenging. Statistics show that the number of single people and childless adults has never been so high in many developed countries.
We all have a sensation that something is slightly off in our modern society, however, we are not able to pinpoint the exact reason why.
The truth is that there is not one single cause for the problematic modern dating landscape.
It is rather a subtle combination of multiple social developments, each pushing us into dangerous vicious cycles.
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Illusion of romanticism
The first danger comes from the idea of romanticism. It is a view of love that has been embedded in our society over the past centuries. It professes that true love can be found only if we follow our feelings.
By doing so and fighting adversity with grand romantic gestures, we will eventually find the one. A soulmate that will love us forever unconditionally, will complete us and will be able to truly understand us.
The fantasy that someone can be our lover, our best friend, our teacher, and our psychologist, is beautiful. The danger, however, is that society is portraying this fantasy, through movies and social media, as something achievable in real life.
Consequently, we are increasing our expectations of what love is supposed to be.
This leads to disappointment first, and then to a society where everyone is jumping from one love story to another instead of committing to long-term love.
This is because romanticism can feel real in the first stages of a relationship when we are falling in love. There, we only know a small part of the person we are falling in love with and can easily idealize the rest.
Through time, however, there will be an unavoidable clash between the idealized romantic version of our partner, and the unavoidable imperfections of real life.
The clash of our reality with our fantasies is the moment when true love should develop. True love means accepting the unavoidable imperfections of our partner, learning to communicate, and being willing to embark on a mutual growth journey.
Doing so requires to be rational and to do some hard work. It is on the contrary much easier to jump into the next romantic adventure, getting carried away by fantasies and feelings, and keeping the hope of romanticism alive.
So now everybody wants to fall in love, but nobody is ready to love.
Unattainable standards
Due to the advent of technology, we are getting increasingly exposed to digital content.
This allows us to see and hear about many more things than it would have been impossible centuries ago. Our interconnection is increasing, and so is our awareness of everything happening around the globe.
However, there are also some downsides. To keep us engaged with this digital content, companies need to always show us more extreme actions, more amazing places, and more beautiful and successful people.
These unreal standards of the internet are distorting our perception of how normal people in real life should be and look like.
Consequently, we feel less attracted by the people we see in our daily life and instead of approaching them, we prefer to go back into the digital world, consuming more unrealistic content.
The more we do that the higher we set our standards, increasing the gap between reality and the internet.
The advent of artificial intelligence, where it will be possible to create perfect-looking people designed by algorithms to do and say whatever we want them to, will only make this situation worse.
This addiction to digital content also creates a mismatch between what we expect from our partner in terms of beauty, personality, and success, and what we can provide. We then wrongly hope to get more than what we could give back, leading to unavoidable rejections and disappointments.
Unlimited options
The advent of dating apps is further distorting our view of reality.
Successful and good-looking people, whom we could only fantasize about while watching movies or scrolling on social media, are now suddenly just a few swipes away.
We had before a clear distinction between the social circle we were bound to and the unreachable world of those out of our league.
Now dating apps are giving us the illusion, that there are no more social boundaries, and that we have unlimited options when it comes to finding the right partner.
Having unlimited options, combined with romantic ideals and our increased standards, is very dangerous.
Every time we get a new match we feel a dopamine rush and start idealizing the person we are about to date. After a short time we get disappointed because there is a mismatch between expectations and reality and end up rejecting that person for a new match and a new illusion.
Even worse, we may end up having a successful date with someone out of our league who is just looking for some casual fun, and end up convincing ourselves to be much better than what we are.
People out of our league will continue using us just for fun and we will reject those who are as normal as we are and are looking for genuine love and connection.
Dating apps are a playground for successful and good-looking people and an escape from reality for the average ones.
After giving and receiving many rejections we start losing our values, allowing our impulses to take over. We end up prioritizing fun and superficiality over loyalty and connection, lose our self-worth, and lower our chances of maintaining a healthy monogamous relationship when we find a good match.
We may have unlimited options now with online dating, but we only have a limited amount of choices we can make.
If we keep on rejecting and jumping to the next romantic adventure, we will eventually end up lonely. No beautiful body or romantic first date can fulfill our longing for feeling loved and understood.
Transactional love
The reason why dating apps are so successful nowadays is because they are partially addressing the loneliness crisis all the modern big cities are facing.
Communities are slowly disappearing because in big cities it becomes much harder to meet people regularly and create new relationships.
There are fewer and fewer places where people living close to each other can regularly meet and also fewer reasons to do so. With online services and automation, we can get all we need without any human interaction.
This is leading to a lack of spontaneity and a reduced openness to new encounters.
Nobody is expecting now to be approached by a stranger and approaching someone has become much harder. Being surrounded by people with headphones staring at screens makes what is already a challenging task even more daunting.
This is why dating apps thrive. We don’t need communities and the courage to talk to a stranger anymore, we can stay in front of our phone and get connected to people fulfilling all our requirements with just a simple swipe.
The more we use dating apps the more we lose the incentive to look for new interactions during our daily life.
Love used to be spontaneous, growing out of coincidences and regular encounters, now it is transactional, predefined by individual wishes and expectations.
However, love can’t be treated as a transaction. We are humans, not products that can be ordered, tried out, and then thrown away when not needed anymore.
The more we treat people as products, the more we drift away from healthy morals, losing our ability to face difficult discussions, commit, connect, grow together, and most importantly be kind.
Focus on self-realization
If communities are disappearing and love is becoming transactional, it is also because we are changing our priorities in life.
While the well-being of families and communities used to be the driver for many people, now self-realization has gained more importance.
The idea that we are now in a free world where everything is achievable, is putting a huge unfair burden on our shoulders.
It is not a matter of background, genetics, or external circumstances anymore, it only depends on how much we want to fight for our dreams. We can become CEOs, Olympic champions, or superstars if we dedicate enough time to it.
This focus on self-realization is not only leading us to disappointment, once our ambitious dreams clash with the truth of our environment, but also to loneliness.
The more we are willing to change city or country for a new job, work long hours, and embrace stress, the less time and energy we can dedicate to finding love.
The status and the financial wealth we may achieve through our hard work won’t be able to numb the unavoidable pain of loneliness due to the lack of meaningful relationships.
Instead of seeking love, we may end up working even harder, blinded by the illusion that more status and more money will cure our loneliness.
However, the more self-sufficient and self-realized we become, the less open we are to making compromises to let someone else into our life.
Before focusing on our self-realization, we should prioritize our self-love, to fulfill our emotional and physical needs.
…
Love is complicated these days, as wrong ideals and values are pushing us to be more lonely, and the solutions we are offered often make the problem worse.
Instead of tormenting ourselves for feeling lonely, we should be aware of the vicious cycles of modern society. We should feel compassionate for those trapped in these cycles instead of resenting them.
Let’s stop blaming the other sex for the modern dating landscape, as the root causes are outside of our control. Instead of following sexist movements making the situation even worse, let’s be aware of our struggles, and let’s help each other out.
Let’s strive for connection, respect each other’s feelings, embrace spontaneity, prioritize our emotional well-being, and learn to love each other’s imperfections. But most importantly, let’s be kind to one another.
We are small lights in this dark and alienated society, if we keep on shining someone not blinded by wrong values and ideals will eventually notice us.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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