The End of Love
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
One recent man had a lot going for him. In fact he was the most promising prospect I’d had in some time. But then he mentioned that he got his daily coffee from Starbucks, and I found it hard to imagine dating someone who liked Starbucks coffee; or even if they liked the coffee, didn’t find Starbucks so odious and soul-diminishingly ubiquitous they would never go there.
to be a bit much :D
> “How come you never got married, Nasruddin?” asked his friend.
> “Well,” said Nasruddin, “to tell you the truth, I spent my youth looking for the perfect woman. In Cairo, I met a beautiful, intelligent woman, with eyes like dark olives, but she was unkind. Then in Baghdad, I met a woman who was a wonderful and generous, but we had no interests in common. One woman after another would seem just right, but there was always something missing. Then one day, I met her. She was beautiful, intelligent, generous and kind. We had everything in common. In fact she was perfect.”
> “What happened?” Nasruddin’s friend asked, “Why didn’t you marry her?”
> Nasruddin replied, “It’s a sad thing. Seems she was looking for the perfect man.”
You can go looking for the perfect person and never find them - or you can choose to be with someone and say “I’m flawed and you are flawed but we are going to try our hardest to make it work in spite of our flaws”.
> Oh, you can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks
> Yes, you can stare into the abyss, but it's staring right back
With arranged marriages, the decision is made, so they have to make it work, for the rest of us, we think it’s the decision that matters more than anything else, so we place too much value on making the decision, as if a perfect one exists and place less value on making that decision work.
I can empathize with the author on this one, that sometimes your emotional interest in someone dissipates for superficial reasons, but no matter how much you rationally know it’s dumb, you also know it’s unlikely you’ll think yourself out of the hole.
The internet tricks them into living in some fantasy world in which perfection is not only possible, but accessible. To connect with someone is not to open oneself to the surprising richness of life and experience and to stumble into a fulfilling partnership in which you, crucially, grow but rather a little game with "goals", and "checklists", "non-negotiables". It's scrolling through dossiers and presentations and a constant comparison of the "real deal", which is never up to snuff, with these digital portraits.
If people took a second to just reflect on how rigid, robotic, and insufferable they've let themselves become, and instead opted for the natural, childlike openness that we all have inside, before we let ourselves start treating life like some kind of quarterly deliverable, they'd fare much better.
A relationship will never form if you refuse to budge. It's as much about being willing to change yourself, grow, and bob down the winding rivers of life without certainty as it is about finding someone that makes the current you happy.
No doubt, dating is hard. But here we have someone who is literally making it harder than it must be, squandering her chances, full "Hazy Shade of Winter" style ("See what's become of me / While I looked around for my possibilities"). It's self-indulgent self-torment, and it makes Sartre look like he threw in two people too many into the famous play. It's certainly the end of love for her. Whew.
On a broader note, maybe dating was never sustainable in the first place. The concept of dating is, for the most part, a 20th century invention. In any earlier time, it would have been considered low-key prostitution. As a man, the expectation that I pay for anything regardless of how well I know the other person or how the date goes always felt kinda dirty. Which is why I stopped doing that a long time ago, even before I quit dating all together. Dating can't be untangled from the inertia of technology, and it was inevitable that dating just wouldn't scale well.
We're never going back to some hypothetical time where dating actually worked, but I do think there are pathways that can at least lead to better tradeoffs:
1. Far more people should be open to making acquaintances offline and be willing to introduce friends they think would be compatible.
2. We need to drop the pretense that the only places left for men and women to meet each other after college is at bars, and any context outside of that would be harassment.
3. Everyone is unique, but people need to consider whether their idiosyncrasies are ultimately working against them. As far as the United States is concerned, we've gone way too far in the direction of everybody thinking they can get everything their way, yet few actually do. For instance, if you're perpetually single but you're turning down people for liking Starbucks, maybe you should rethink whether you're the fool for not just accepting the coffee others like.
4. Call a spade a spade and just start calling all dating apps "hookup" apps, because that's what they're best suited for. We should reject the idea that there isn't something inherently salacious about apps like Tinder, and that attitude needs to be a part of the culture.
5. In the modern world, technology (dating apps, ML/AI-assisted image enhancement shifting expectations of average attractiveness, and the destruction of socialization by TikTok/Insta/Snap) has rendered a significant portion of the male population undateable/unmatchable. This has tipped the scales largely in favor of the men in the desirable pool, as more women compete over that narrowing set. Purists may call this some sort of extreme Darwinism. The end result will be at least a generation or two of outsized suffering for males in the middle of the bell curve.
That's a "first date" every two weeks or so.
Honestly sounds like a keeper. Imagine being that relaxed that you can just have a little snooze for a bit after meeting someone.
If after 100+ first dates you don't like anyone, then perhaps face the reality that it's probably you, not them?
I wasn't sure on my wedding day that I truly loved and wanted to be with the person I was marrying, but 15 years and 3 kids later I couldn't imagine being with anyone else or loving anyone more. Maybe not having to stick it out and make it work is causing some sort of paralysis?
+1.
I was called for jury duty, and the judge was a lady I'd met at a singles event.
I approached the bench and said, "I've met you socially, Your Honor." She said, "I thought you looked familiar."
That's not grounds for being dismissed from the case, if you're wondering.
What’s even worse is she’s been twice divorced and already has kids, but expects a perfect man in return. It’s hard to have empathy when she’s rejecting people based on Marvel movies and Starbucks.
This woman is suffocating in choice, while the armies of men who are not good enough for her would be happy to get 1/100th of the activity she's seeing. We really do live on different planets.
Maybe a potential remedy is for straight men to move back to predominantly hitting on people in real life in the hopes of finding a woman not on OLD. OLD is only making the straight women on their platforms more repugnant, and really doesn’t provide high quality or quantity for the average man.
It was so much easier in person because there would be no other person trying to do the same. Online I was competing with thousands of people.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get the sense this person doesn't know who she's looking for, but she already knows that most normal humans with a normal existence will never fit her needs, of which she's not fully sure either.
> When the other participants turned on their cameras one by one, they were all middle-aged white ladies too.
Is this a taste of what's to come from the latest wave of hyper-successful and hyper-educated women outpacing men in everything outside of suicides and incarceration? Their standards can understandably no longer be met by the mating marketplace, they refuse to settle because they know their theoretical worth, and the markets keep not clearing. What an interesting historic time.
The Secretary Problem [0], or "optimal stopping" problem indicates that given the perception of an infinite field of options, the author will not be able to determine an optimal stopping point. It's not very good news.
When our perception of our options outpaces our actual ones, that's going to create a cycle of addicted behaviour. Dating apps are literally slot machines for people, and that is a terrible evolutionary strategy.
Clearly she puts in effort by going to dates. But she’s not developing her own psychology enough. She had to fight this tooth and nail and gone on a few more dates with him. Her issue is that she thinks she can predict what a relationship will be like with him and that Marvel and Starbucks would be too bad as an experience. (Edit: not entirely accurate but typing on phone)
More gratitude needed, more optimism needed
Dating apps aren’t the problem it’s her mindset.
Note: I go on dates 1.5 times per week myself, on average. I’m having a blast. I’m no casanova, in most cases it ends in the friendzone. I recently met one person though that might be something more and she lives on another continent. It helps that I am a digital nomad.
But yea, lots of effort but not in the right place. IMO dating needs to be strategic for certain people (like the author) and she has no strategy on being grateful and accepting flaws, or so it seems.
There was a TED talk once on a woman who hacked online dating for herself. She should do more of that.
Dating takes a lot of effort for some (me as well). Roll with it and create something beautiful. In my case I need to have a thick skin in being okay with rejection. In her case, her filters are set too tight (emotionally).
Then again, I am not good with English emotional words, I know what they mean but I don’t feel much when they’re said, second language
If you think one guy is an asshole, he’s probably an asshole. If you think everyone is an asshole… It’s time to do some hard introspection.
> Men have not been compelled to use sexuality as a leverage to receive social and economic resources and thus have no reason to implicate their whole self in sexuality
What if these people would care to read a bit of biology (like etology, evolution) and also evolutionary psychology? The claim in the quote is kind of 100% upside down. The reality is something like: "Men have been compelled to use their economic and social resources as a leverage to receive sex and thus have a very strong reason to implicate their whole self in work (or any other way available to acquire these)"
Because this is how it works. But even if we disregard the evolutionary dynamic the base claim is false: women aren't compelled to use sexuality to receive social or economic resources in modern Western societies. They can, you know work. And actually most of them do. This was (is) one of the most fundamental goals of feminism. While you could argue that the author simply depicts women as helpless prostitutes.
Now it's true that most women/women on average will chose men who are financially and (or?) socially are at least on par with them, preferably having a higher status/salary/earning potential. (And this is has been observed in a wide range of societies according e.g. to David Buss [1].) And that preference is what makes men 'compelled' to compete hard for the economic and social resources. (BTW, this is, I think, at least one of the reasons behind men having higher salaries and roles.)
So again, the reality seems to be the exact opposite of what the quote from book says. (And no, I'm not blaming women at all.)
>> It wasn’t my goal to go on dates with a lot of people, or to carry out some anthropological or sociological study.
Perhaps, not a conscious goal, but surely, her behaviour was more than just a little driven by professional motivations, resulting as it did in this essay.
She had also written a book on a related topic.
I feel sorry for those 107 people who didn't realise the game was rigged.
If you go on one hundred and seven dates and it doesn't work out...
I never asked if it was the only factor.
> Smart people will care about who you are, not what you have.
Smart people don't talk themselves into believing things and then resent them later.
> Good luck
Don't need it.
More seriously, that's the optimal solution if your goal is to maximize the probability that you end up with the single best person in the pool. I don't think that's a good match for most people's objectives when dating.
(If instead each prospective partner has a score chosen uniformly randomly between 0 and 1, and you want to maximize your average partner-score, then you should use a similar strategy but with about sqrt(N) dates before taking the next that's better, instead of N/e. That's still not super-realistic but it's probably more realistic.)
This author is overcomplicating what is a very straight forward thing.
I am 41, my wife is 36 - we are at the age where all our friends had either figured it out (got married, had kids) or it's very clearly not going to happen.
In every case where "it's not going to happen" despite the person saying they want a relationship - it is very clearly related to the person themself, usually a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health issue that lead to unproductive/self sabotaging behavior.
This article claims problems dating stem from capitalism, oddly shaped expectations, etc - but I don't know if that's it (unless those are the things that have made people act crazy and self sabotage)
In one of the early paragraphs, she describes a series of insane date experiences. Among my friends, some have this kind of experience always and some have it never, and it's something about them that seeks out and allows this experiences, just one aspect of self sabotage.
It's not that everyone has this experience. My wife has never had a truly horrible date despite being single in NYC for many years, neither have I not many of our now married friends. I think usually there are red flags very early on and it takes a certain person to ignore them and get into that situation.
I don't have an answer, except that I am pretty sure I wouldn't have the family I have if I hadn't spent a few years in therapy and I recommend that to everyone. If your relationship life isn't what you want, it's not "capitalism" it's you.
And you know whats crazy.. There are men here too! Crazy thought right? And I mean great men who have the values so many western women claim to be looking for. I’m curious If the idea of dating a good man from a 3rd world country ever crosses the minds of these “struggling” women who have the same means I do?
She talked about how drinking Starbucks was a deal breaker for her. My current partner has multiple qualities that would have been deal breakers if I had evaluated them in the online dating context, and yet I am very happy in this relationship.
Time to take a good look in the mirror, honey.
No, she's still insufferable at the end.
The vast amount of choices and nearly unlimited supply that hookup apps have on offer messes with her head
This is a common recurring theme with single aging middle aged woman with kids types.
The simple analysis is she’s being too picky, but the simple analysis is too easy; this is a intelligent woman who tries very hard to introspect and self-reflect and pours an enormous amount of effort into trying to find love, and in my opinion that effort earns her a right to a correspondingly more effortful analysis.
She feels distrust towards dating apps, seeing them as “casinos“; she feels a sense that this breakdown of the dating market is being blamed on women somehow; she feels this is unfair. All valid feelings, and when we put them together we get the start of a much more interesting analysis.
She says she has been on a hundred dates. (I would absolutely love for her to give a ballpark figure of how many profiles she has viewed - I suspect high five figures with a fat, fat tail out to high six, but for the purposes of this analysis I will use a conservative estimate of 10,000.)
She specifies in about two thirds of her dates, her filters were telling her no but she went anyway out of a fear that her filters were somehow wrong, and then her filters were confirmed later on. The Starbucks example quoted by other commenters is illustrative: she rejects on the basis that she can’t like a man who likes Starbucks, but then rejects her own rejection and tries anyway, but then discovers he also likes Marvel movies and her initial rejection is re-confirmed: “But then he mentioned he got his daily coffee from Starbucks… but then he mentioned mostly watching Marvel movies…”.
“But then he mentioned”. 10,000 profiles viewed, 100 dates, ~0 long term relationships. No car selfies. Dating apps are casinos. Let’s put it all together:
Dating apps present a stunning over-abundance of choice, which forces women to construct a veritable armory of cheap and hard filters just to even begin to start considering individuals. But dating is an incomplete information game where there’s an initial dump of information on a profile, and then more is revealed over time in conversation and on dates. Any set of filters that can practically reduce the initial superabundance to a manageable amount based on the initial info dump will likewise reduce the manageable amount to ~0 when more information is revealed. And so after the first date, she must return to the dating app.
Is this what’s going on? We might think to examine womens’ psyches for evidence to support our conclusion, but that would be very rude and also we suck at doing that. Instead, we might examine dating apps to see if they use superabundance and low initial information. Well, Tinder exemplifies this pattern - it absolutely inundates you with superficial profiles and demands an immediate, often split-second “no / maybe” decision (your filters have to be incredibly cheap to compute under those constraints). Is Tinder more successful than other dating apps? Yes - in fact it’s more successful than all other dating apps put together. We might be on to something here.
tl;dr Dating apps are designed to hack womens’ psychology and make them super-picky, because pickiness sets them up to fail the rest of the relationship and this makes them a returning customer.
Though I mentioned some things that I think will help society move past this phase of "modern dating", I forgot to mention specifically that if anything's going to change, it may only happen if women collectively start rejecting hookup apps. All of the women I know seem to realize they hate something about apps like Tinder, yet continue relying on them, but maybe enough of them will eventually put two and two together. It's not just the men whom are failing them, but the technology itself.
Of those 100 very few would be willing to be seen with her in public, and clearly not interested in commiting. It's subtle, but you can clearly pick it up reading her lamentations
How many men that are 6ft+, are educated and have their shit together put in 40yo single moms with 3kids and colorful past as their commitment filter?
This has always been the case with all dating apps from the start (except for maybe a few that tried to actively designed around it). This phenomenon emerges automatically from how dating platforms and people work: 1. men are expected to do the approach/first move (this is socially and evolutionary encoded in both sexes) 2. men initially put the bar somewhat lower and mostly care about looks at first (I'd say it makes a lot of sense, especially in online dating, but only if you disregard that the photos end up manipulated) 3. women (and also men) will start manipulating their photos. Even just selecting your best photos is manipulation. (I'm not saying it's wrong or unreasonable.) 4. men will do more approaches than IRL because it's cheap and safe and also can be done in parallel 5. women will receive a lot more approaches than IRL because men do more apporoaches
and this turns on the cycle: 6. women will feel that they have a lot higher desirability than what they were used to IRL/before starting to date online. They'll become picky, will feel higher status and start to be mean with some of the men who approach. Actually they don't have to be actively and explicitly mean, not being nice with the rejection is bad enough for men (see 7.). And being nice to all the unwanted approachers is hard. I mean it can be hard work so it's frustrating. 7. men will start to see that their efforts don't pay off. I mean it will pay off for the top say 5-20% but not for the others. So they get frustrated and try to further minimize the investment in each approach 8. this makes women feel even worse about all the unwanted approaches and they'll be even less considerate about those who they don't want (while porbably increasing the bar). They'll start complaining and putting stupid requirements (messages, really) on their profile, like the usual "those who do X and are Y need not bother to swipe right", etc. 9. this further frustrates men
etc. The cycle is on. Online dating, at least the naive approches, don't work because it makes the wrong thing easy and efficient. (And yes, due to the business models of these platforms they are not motivated to solve the issue. After all, the more users they have the better it is for them. They are getting paid for keeping people on the platform and not getting them off i.e. hook them up.)
I do agree with you that if she did have less judgment, some of those 100+ men would have been great partners. She mentions a French economist she dated who said “if he was going to be sent to a deserted island and had to choose between me and “someone gorgeous,” of course he would choose me, because I would be more interesting to talk to forever and he could still have sex with me too. But in the real world, surrounded by other people who’d be looking at him-with-me, he knew he would feel ashamed of me because he could have been with a more beautiful woman.” This mixture of acceptance and rejection may have just been his way of softening the blow of his rejection of her, but it may have also been his awkward unromantic way of saying “I will settle for you”. Willingness to settle like that might be the model we have to adapt to survive a dating market warped by high-powered dating apps.
I also think you’re bending my words into a straw man. If I had to play this game, the better answer would be “it’s an addictive gambler’s responsibility to keep out of casinos, or set a limit and stay within it”.
An addict has problems with alcohol. It’s their responsibility to deal with it. The fallout in their life is their responsibility to handle, nobody else’s.
A bipolar person can’t control their moods. It’s still their responsibility to deal with the fallout of manic episodes and try to stabilize their mood. Eventually most bipolar have the ability to recognize that they are at the centre of the broken relationships in their life and act upon that knowledge for the positive.
She’s either already vain and entitled or became repugnantly vain and entitled through OLD. It’s her responsibility to deal with that. The article reads like someone trying to bury the fact that they are at the centre of their suffering.
I agree tolerance and willingness to settle are key attributes to a happy and long lasting relationship. She seems to have neither in spades.
Regarding the casino comparison: casinos are an established institution that we might categorize as “mildly exploitative”, and we have a mature moral/ethical framework around permitting them to exist, judging people who they exploit, etc. (Like, we DO permit casinos to exist, we say things like “enjoy them responsibly and expect to lose because the house always wins”, we would respect someone who refuses to attend casinos because they know they have a gambling problem, and so on.) I think the casino comparison is valuable mostly because we currently DON’T see dating apps as mildly exploitative pickiness-inducers, and we probably should.