How to Understand the Challenges of Modern Dating
Each generation faces its own set of challenges—wars, recessions, shoulder pads. The same holds true for dating. While people of every era have bemoaned their love lives, today’s singles might just be right: Dating is harder now than ever before. And the next time your mom pesters you about finding someone nice to settle down with, you can tell her I said that.
In this book, I’ll offer solutions to some of life’s most difficult dating decisions. But before I get to the tactical advice, I want to set the stage and explain the factors conspiring against modern daters. If looking for love has left you feeling incredibly stressed out, here’s why.
Religion, community, and social class dictated the lives of our ancestors. Expectations were clear, and personal decisions were few. Based on where and into what kind of family you were born, you knew, for example, that you’d work as a textile merchant, live in Bucharest, eat kosher food, and go to the synagogue. Or you’d work as a farmer, live on the outskirts of Shanghai, and eat livestock and crops from your land. When it came to finding a partner, the answer often came down to the dowry—who could offer the best acres of land or the largest caravan of camels.
Today all these decisions are up to us. Modern life is a path that we must chart on our own. Whereas our predecessors didn’t have to weigh where to live or what to do for a living, we make those choices now. That gives us incredible freedom to shape our identities—to pick Nashville over Atlanta, to choose whether to work as a meteorologist or a mathematician—but that freedom comes at the cost of certainty. Late at night, our faces lit by the blue glow of our smartphones, we wonder, Who am I? and What am I doing with my life? The dark side of all this freedom and endless choice is the crippling fear that we’ll screw up our lifelong pursuit of happiness. If we’re in charge, then we have only ourselves to blame. We could fail, and then it would be our fault.
And one of the biggest questions left up to us—a decision that used to be made by our parents and our community—is Who should I pick as a romantic partner?
We’re experiencing a seismic shift in dating culture. Dating itself only began in the 1890s. Online dating started in 1994 with Kiss.com, followed shortly by Match.com a year later. And we’ve been swiping for love for less than a decade. If it feels like we’re in the middle of a gigantic cultural experiment, it’s because we are.
We’re no longer limited to the single people we know from work or church or our neighborhood. Now we can swipe through hundreds of potential partners in a single sitting. But there’s a downside to these seemingly infinite options. Psychologists, including Barry Schwartz, professor emeritus at Swarthmore, have shown that while people crave choice, too many options can make us feel less happy and more doubtful of our decisions. They call this the paradox of choice.
People are struggling. Like that obnoxious person in front of you in the fro-yo line who can’t pick a flavor (“Can I try them all one more time?”), we’re crippled by analysis paralysis. And this is especially true when it comes to choosing a life partner.
What’s the last purchase you researched online? Which electric toothbrush to buy? Which wireless Bluetooth speakers to get your brother for his new apartment? We live in an information-rich society that offers the false comfort of research. It can feel like the perfect decision is only a few more Google searches away. Whether we’re selecting the most authentic taco place or the best-performing vacuum cleaner, we can consult endless rankings and reviews. It feels like if we can research all our choices, then we can select the right one.
We’ve gotten hooked on this feeling of certainty, and we crave it in our romantic lives. But when it comes to relationships, that kind of assurance doesn’t exist. There is no “right answer” to questions like Who should I be with? and How much should I compromise? and Will they ever change? No amount of Googling will reveal if James or Jillian will make a good spouse. We can’t achieve complete certainty before any big relationship decision—and luckily, we don’t have to in order to be happy. Great relationships are built, not discovered. But our minds are often stuck in a trap, thinking that by combing through hundreds of options, we’ll be closer to knowing whether the one in front of us is “right.”
Years ago, people lived in communal villages. They witnessed other couples being affectionate, fighting, and making up. There was no such thing as a private problem. Today our primary view into other people’s relationships is staged, curated, Instagram-filtered social media feeds—excited mid-hike engagement announcements, vacation pictures with a snoozing baby strapped on someone’s chest. This leads us to feel like we’re the only ones experiencing heart-wrenching struggles in our love lives (just in much less flattering lighting). Feeling like everyone else’s relationship is perfect when yours is floundering (or nonexistent) exacerbates that pain. I find this is especially true for men, who tend to have smaller social networks and fewer people with whom they can share their fears. They’re even less likely to talk to their friends about their problems and learn that everyone, at one time or another, experiences relationship hardships.
We want to find the best possible partner and build the best possible relationship, yet many of us have witnessed few functional relationships firsthand, especially when we were young.
Divorce rates peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s. And while they’ve gone down since then, many of us are what couples therapist Esther Perel calls “the children of the divorced and disillusioned.” Around 50 percent of marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation, and about 4 percent of married people report feeling miserable in their relationships. Put it all together, and a majority of married people have either chosen to end their relationship or are enduring it unhappily.
This is a problem. Study after study demonstrates the power of role models. It’s much easier to believe something is possible when you’ve seen someone else do it, whether that’s running a four-minute mile or eating seventy-three hot dogs in under ten minutes (#lifegoals). For example, women are much more likely to become inventors if they grew up in a zip code with many female patent holders. In fact, they’re more likely to patent in the same categories as older female inventors in their neighborhood.
The same is true with relationships. We all want to build lasting and fulfilling partnerships, but it’s harder to do that when you lack relationship role models. Many of my clients confess fears around not knowing what the day-to-day looks like in a strong relationship—How do healthy couples resolve conflict? How do happy spouses make decisions together? How do you successfully spend the rest of your life with one person?—because they didn’t observe those behaviors in their own parents.
Even those of us with the best relationship intentions may struggle because many of us haven’t seen a functional relationship in action.
Many of the relationship questions we tackle today never would have crossed the minds of our camel-herding ancestors, such as Are we dating or just hooking up? or Should I break up now or wait until after wedding season is over? We agonize with our close confidants over not knowing whether we’re in love with a new boo or feeling burned out from first dates that go nowhere.
Now, thanks to advances in reliable birth control and fertility science, people can ask themselves about new trade-offs, such as Do I want kids, and if so, when? (It’s unlikely that hunter-gatherers lost a lot of sleep over that one.)
Beyond scientific advances, we’re expanding our models for dating and long-term relationships. We’re pondering questions such as Are we monogamous? and How do we define monogamy?
In some ways, these questions are exciting. Who doesn’t want to feel free and in control of their destiny? But at a certain point, all these options and opportunities can stop making us feel free and start making us feel overwhelmed.
To top it all off, we’re bombarded with messages imploring us to get this decision right. Everyone from public figures like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (who said: “I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is.”) to our own parents (“Don’t make the same mistakes I did!”) reinforces how critical it is that we don’t mess this one up.
It can feel like our entire lives hinge on the one major decision of whom to marry. This is especially true for women, who face more time pressure to pick a spouse if they want to have children by a certain age.
We can take control of our love lives by better understanding ourselves: what motivates us, what confuses us, what gets in our way. And that’s where behavioral science—and this book—comes in.