Here we are in the lead up to Valentine’s Day, and my editor has asked me to write a piece on relationships. Oh dear, what an assignment.
Is it just me, or does love have a PR problem?
It’s hard to say whether it’s less cool to look for love these days, or to actually find it. This makes writing about the state of dating a complicated exercise.
I can only begin with the fact that it’s gotten a little dicey out there. I should know, I’m divorced. Fortunately, being divorced is only one prerequisite for being jaded. The rest I also possess. But divorced or not, we all know the current vibe of the world is not candy hearts, chocolate bars and love notes. And then we’ve got the cold stats on dating to consider.
At risk of this being a report card of sad realities, the semi-annoying but rational NYU professor Scott Galloway is on Goop saying that 45 percent of men ages 18 to 25 have never approached a woman in person. Between 2008 and 2018 the share of men who hadn’t had sex in the last year rose from 8% to 28%, and that’s not even including fans of The Joe Rogan Experience.
Dating app subscriptions are down. “Synthetic”, once a word reserved for condoms, is now being applied to romantic matches on the rise. It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that while social media is rotting our brains, it’s also rotting our hearts.
Vogue’s recent essay “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing? – a pithy little think piece on whether women are right to give up on dating modern men altogether – the answer to which essentially amounts to yes, went viral. Couple that with the Tracee Ellis Ross’ and Gloria Steinems of the world out there making a life lived largely single enviably luxe and meaningful.
It all begs the question: Have we really lost our love for love? Or are we hiding our hearts behind our hyper-independence?
Our grandmothers asked the hetero romantic relationship to provide for and shelter them. Our mothers asked marriage for salvation; a broad-shouldered placeholder for both purpose and power. This generation, clutching to the fragility of both, is asking for it to leave us alone.
Relationships of all kinds are hard work, especially romantic love. Having now been in a relationship for two years you might think I’ve long forgotten what it feels like to be single. I haven’t. And I definitely didn’t arrive here in business class.
I landed bruised and confused, having come out of a marriage followed by what can only be described as a screenworthy run at chaotic, colourful, and somewhat violent singlehood for several years. My sudden rooting down came as a shock to most, most especially my mother. Arrival at any destination is just a comforting illusion.
“But you’ve had such good luck on the apps,” my girlfriend said over a Japanese bento box. And while she’s right that I had many online matches materialise into real-life boyfriends, I’m not sure “luck” is what I’d call it.
Is “luck” necking a bottle of Bintang at the Denpasar airport in pyjama pants before a middle-seat red-eye because a man has just presented you with a typeset list of your faults – complete with dates and times – from his Notes app?
Is it luck to be told, over Guinness, that due to your divorce, you are simply not “as good on paper” as the other woman in his rotation?
Is it luck to go searching for a notebook to jot down Zoom call details and instead find a stack of handwritten love letters your boyfriend has been exchanging with his “best friend” at work, the most recent dated yesterday?
Love bites. And you keep living.
I’ve been reading “How to End a Story” by Helen Garner. To the world, Helen is a late in life, Australian, award-winning author, but to me, she is an idol and I worship her. She’s also a 3x divorcee. The echoes of her “failed” relationships can be felt in my own attempts and failures at love. And yet she never gives up.
She writes: “I don’t know much about getting on with people…I would like to write about the horrible struggles between people who love each other.”
Helen’s approach is not necessarily hopeful. It’s more like grit. She knows men are hard work and she loves them anyway. Which feels more honest than optimistic. Maybe writers always make it sound more simple than it seems. As Mary Oliver wrote, “you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
Sure, Mary. But that animal has never been on Hinge.
Hey, it can’t all be doom and gloom.
What if we all just admitted we’re all a little lonely – inside and outside of romantic relationships? Disconnected. Lost. Tired and burnt out. But we’re still animals. Our flesh needs to love what it loves.
There are sparks that prove some of us still believe. Because while we drift into the arms of artificial intelligence, we also are pumping life back into the corpses of 18th-century romance epics like Emerald Funnel’s Wuthering Heights and Bridgerton. New soft-core porn-mances such have blitzed the Emmys and the runway.
Have you heard of Heated Rivalry?
So here we are, sending mixed signals to the universe.
We devour romance, but detest it. We want love, but we can’t face it.
We’re more than willing to subscribe to love on the big screen and eKindle, but to risk it in real life? That’s a fate worse than death.
But while the cultural zeitgeist is saying women are over real life men, that’s not what my single friends are saying. Yes, they are excelling in their fields, paying their bills, tending to lifelong friendships and aging parents, curing cancer and writing novels, but they are still checking out the cute guy who just walked in the door at the Mediterranean restaurant, neck craning to a full 180 degrees. They are out there on Thursdays and sometimes Tuesdays. Open. Beautiful. Scared, but brave.
The BBC Morning Show is betting on hope. It’s why they started a special called “Rise and Shine” which spotlights members of the community who are giving back and expect nothing in return. If it sounds cheesy, I agree. I too was reluctant to enjoy it, but let me tell you, there’s something about watching the 93-year-old Dory teach dance to the elderly in mini shorts and knee high socks in the middle of South Gloucester that verges on spiritual. It’s a good reminder to pull up your pants and get out there.
I know single women because I was one and surely could be again. I think the modern romantic desert is a boogie man. The reality is, all it takes is one yoga class. One pub night you were reluctant to go to. One 10-minute swiping session to break the drought. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lost hope. Love swims beyond the edges of your doubt.
Even Cher is back in the saddle. Because more embarrassing than wanting love is pretending you don’t. That, or dating a robot.
We can outsource almost everything now. Our groceries, therapy. Orgasms. But not the feeling of being chosen by another flawed human. Love fails. Love humiliates.
And still.
As Bad Bunny’s flag blazed at the Super Bowl: The only thing more powerful than hate is love. Bad Bunny, reportedly, is single.