Why Modern Dating Sucks–Even as a Conventionally Attractive Woman

“I can’t provide that sort of unconditional love for you. You’re looking for a father, not a boyfriend,” my ex told me.

I have a bad habit of always asking questions I know the answer to, because I like being proven right, no matter how hurtful the answer is. I’d ask, “Would you still love me if I were ugly?” to face answers ranging from “I don’t know” to “I’ll try my best to”.

Growing up, I had always believed that love is something earned, not given. The former’s true, unfortunately, in the real world. But you can’t grow up believing it, because your parents are supposed to give you unconditional love. It is the only space in which unconditional love exists, and most people get it early on, so they aren’t too concerned about the level of work needed to tailor themselves to be an attractive enough romantic candidate.

It’s the same as only being retained in a job because of the labor you provide. You’re always going to have to provide something to your partner to be someone worth retaining. It’s sad, but it’s the truth of the world, and most people learn to live with it.

I still can’t cope with it, because there’s a longing in my heart for unconditional love that I have not received from the person I’m actually supposed to receive it from. So, I find myself looking for it by dating anyone who will say anything to convince me that they love me for more than my size two body.

F*ck capitalism (or the capitalism of f*cking).

I get that the rules of the free market inevitably infiltrate into all aspects of life within a capitalist economy. In the dating space, love is a currency and beauty is what is being purchased. Social exchange theory dictates that we build our relationships based on how we can personally benefit from others, whether it be materially or psychologically.

I do not argue against the merits of being used and using others, because only providing for others without being provided for yourself betrays a lack of self-respect. What’s important is not that we are being used, but what we are used for.

“Only women and children receive unconditional love. Men are loved for their ability to provide,” my boyfriend argued. But I contest that it is much better to be used/loved for your money and competence rather than for your beauty and docility.

Being recognized for your capabilities as a provider allows you to self-actualize and develop self-esteem as an agentic individual. While being ‘loved’ as a sex object or trophy girlfriend disables you from being able to self-actualize. You are permanently stuck on defining yourself in relation to how you are to someone else, instead of the individual achievements you derive out of your labor and intelligence.

Women are loved for their ability to provide sexual gratification and boost the male ego through object-subject relations, with the woman being the object and the man being the subject. In this view, women are dependents while men operate agentically.

Pop culture deludes women into thinking that everything will fall into place once they find “the one”. The One (capitalized) is a family-resemblance concept that consists of unwilted flowers, plain dark chocolate, waking up next to someone looking like a snack instead of airplane food, the mystical female orgasm, financial security, emotional connection, stable housing, Michelin star restaurants, sex lasting for more than three rounds, kids with good genes, plus all the other stuff, places, and settings described in third-rate romance novels.

But fantasies of dark oak furniture, designer labels, and being sexy without Spanx can never allow someone to reach self-actualization.

Everyone — men, women, enbies, trans people — wants to be loved for who they really are: adored for their real self and not ideal self, to be cherished for their idiosyncrasies and not in spite of. There is nothing more human than the longing to feel love and to be loved in return; to hold someone’s hands and feel the universe in your palms, to gaze into someone’s eyes and feel the connection to their soul.

But this addicting, electrifying feeling seems cheap in retrospect. In the midst of vapid descriptions by male authors of soft breasts and lush lips, can someone see me as a person first before a woman?

Can someone please love me unconditionally? All I want is to not have to be a good girl in order to be loved. This is the sort of love only a parent can provide, and some children never get the chance to grow up. I need the security of knowing that if I hypothetically switch bodies with someone else my partner would still love me the same.

I’d like to imagine that we are brains-in-a-vat and they’ll love me for my personality and not anything else, and I don’t know if this sort of thinking is something everybody secretly desires or that it is only a fantasy delusional adult children have.

I’m not looking for mere sweet-talks.

Sometimes, boys take it too far, in that they say they love you unconditionally to the extent that if you suffered amnesia or head trauma, and it drastically affected your personality, they will still love you the same. I think that’s bullshit. Because then, the essence of “me” would no longer be retained, and all they are loving is really a different person superimposed on the shell of my no-longer-existent former self.

In response, I always give them this thought experiment: Imagine a machine that exchanges atoms from Richard Nixon’s body with mine. At what point in the atomic exchange process would you stop loving me and start loving Richard Nixon?

No one has been able to answer this question adequately so far. I discovered that unconditional love does not exist in terms of accepting whatever personality changes your partner might go through — because people’s personalities change according to fluctuating life circumstances — and that’s perfectly acceptable.

So when I say I want to be loved unconditionally, I mean that I want to be seen for my personality now, and I accept someone losing interest in me due to personality changes or defects, but I can’t stand someone loving me because of my looks or stop loving me the instant I turn ugly. I don’t mind circumstantial love, just not the type that is a biproduct of shallow male sexual fantasies.

But maybe I’m too cynical.

Perhaps it’s not a tale of objectification and dehumanization, but about the fundamentally human desire for art and beauty.

“You say you don’t care about beauty, but you’re defining that in a really narrow sense,” my boyfriend argued. “You’re drawn to linguistically intelligent guys right? It’s because their words remind you of beauty, because you just so happen to be blessed with a brain that primarily interprets the world via a linguistic lens instead of visual.

When your heart races at eloquence, you don’t think about how his eloquence gives him a leg up in the job market or makes him a good provider. You just think it’s beautiful.

Isn’t that the same?

We don’t think about how a girl’s appearance is going to make her a good wife or boost our status among our peers. We are just drawn to beauty, and visual beauty is the most immediate. If I were blind, I might interpret beauty through another medium, but I will still strive for beauty nonetheless.”

I suppose he has a point. I also often wonder why I am so drawn to politically incorrect, nicotine-addicted boys.

I think it’s because they remind me of beautifully written books about ugly people, and when I meet these boys I don’t think of them playing Assassin’s Creed while I do the laundry, but I think of heart-stopping prose by Mary Gaitskill.

Maybe I’m pissed at everyone else for having a healthy — or so I’ll pretentiously assume, ‘conventional’ — view of beauty and desire, while I’m drawn to new interpretations of unorthodox things because I think I’m fucked up myself and I crave for someone to love me for my fucked up self the same way I love emotionally unavailable skater boys with the anger management issues of a wife beater and the physical constitution of a twink.

“You’re no better than the rest of us,” said my boyfriend. “Just because your value system is inverted does not mean you are free from measuring things using a value system, no matter how ‘unconventional’ that value system is.”

It’s a universal frustration.

The universal frustration women have with love is succinctly summarized by Nagata Kabi in her book, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness: “I was excessively afraid of being defined as a woman before I was seen as myself.”

But maybe love shouldn’t feel this hard. I think it’s hard to invest in love when you’re emotionally deprived, and I might never know how emotionally fulfilled people experience love. Kabi further wrote, “I thought my parents would love me more as a child. So I couldn’t become an adult.”

So maybe I’ll start taking “Looking for a woman who takes care of herself” on men’s Tinder bios seriously. I know it’s a euphemism for “a girl in her early twenties, tight body, clear skin…” but I think the description makes a reasonable amount of sense when you interpret it in a vacuum. It’s just like what they say before flights take off: “Put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting others.”

But I still can’t breathe.