An 'Intimacy Crisis' Is Driving the Dating Divide

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I wonder how much of this is due to the likes of Instagram, where everybody presents a throughout curated, filtered version of themselves, setting unrealistic expectations as a baseline everywhere.

Being flawed is not same as not being maxed-out.

While not accepting flaws (serious ones) is a good thing, the problem is that people poisoned by social media do not accept non-maxed-out people. Even aspiration and effort to improve is not enough, one has to be already in the perfect state.

Though maybe you have meant that, that even small imperfections are not acceptable anymore.

I've found that the core issue is that they don't accept or love themselves. If you can't accept yourself in spite of your imperfections, it becomes nearly impossible to love/care about someone else for reasons beyond the superficial; how they look, where they sit on the social ladder, etc.

So you end up with a whole bunch of people focused on chasing status to feel worthy of having a partner who already has that status.