Why finding love is more complicated than ever
Today I want to talk about why the path to love is so hard for modern singletons.
Pre-modernity, the path to love was fairly straight-forward. It began with some form of seemingly inevitable arrangement — either a direct introduction by influential members, or stuffy societal expectations, leaving little room for personal choice1.
Choices of life partners were limited to those within a small travelling distance, similar social status, similar ethnic group, and so on.
And then came the ritual, typically a wedding and marriage. After these vows, the expectations of the couple were straight-forward: to start a family, buy a house, and build social status.
Love was expected to appear, if at all, through this process of growth and building a life together. It wasn't an expectation — it was an outcome.
In short: ritual before love.
Nowadays, the path to love is convoluted. Arranged introductions are uncommon, and society is less opinionated on choice of partner than ever before.
The majority of young people live in major cities, and dating apps provide singletons easy access to one another.
The pool of potential partners is ever larger, but — and this is the crucial point — society no longer helps us in finding, selecting, and filtering a partner.
We must instead do this work ourselves, and our task is vastly harder.
So: given this challenge, how does a single person find a partner?
They do the selection and filtering themselves. Given the vast number of potential partners available to them, they — quite rationally — choose not to readily commit, but to instead evaluate multiple partners over a period of time.
And because we do not need to make a decision fast, and can easily explore other opportunities, we expect much more from our choice of partner.
Before any firm commitment of matrimony, we expect love2 to be present.
In short, love then ritual.
In the modern era, our desires and expectations for a good, committed relationship are much greater than in the past.
But the time we give ourselves to achieve these goals — often months — is much less than the years and decades our forebears would spend to achieve the same intimacy.
It is this rationalisation of the challenge we face that has made the path to love so much more arduous than it previously was.
We’re trying to squeeze in the work of years and decades into months.
We’re trying to squeeze in the work of years and decades into months.
I don’t have any solutions or any guidance to offer here.
But it is reassuring to realise there are systematic and societal reasons for this challenge, and that it’s presence isn’t a reflection of ourselves.
Good luck out there!
Till next time :)