It’s just about cupid day, and so the obligatory articles on modern romance, the joy of solitude and how marriage makes dudes live longer have already begun to surface.
Despite my cynicism, The Guardian had four perspectives on modern love with a couple of nuggets spread across them. The best of them from the Modern Love columnist in the Times who posited:
“The wonderful and terrible thing about love is our complete inability to master it. Highly educated people seem to fail at love as easily as poorly educated people do. But if there’s one dominant pattern of the last decade, it’s how we are using technology to protect ourselves against vulnerability.”
On the one hand, it’s nice that we haven’t boiled down love into a formula and that the fumbling through it by even the smartest of people is probably something that makes it “stick” more than if it were all smooth paths.
I am wondering if in the world of Tinder/Bumble/even Match if technology is going to impact a fundamental change in the arc of romance-to-relationship and change the timbre of long-term commitments. It is so effortless to make the initial contact, there is little emotional capital spent/lost when the connection is suspended. This plays out in the early dating phase, but I wonder if it colors the depth of the longer relationships that emerge. Maybe not only in the origins of the romance, but also because at the slightest sign of trouble, the next option is just a right-swipe away.
Finding love is still the life priority where the personal importance and focused-energy-exerted is most out of balance in society. Would be pairings remain incredibly fragmented, and the genius of Netflix’ content-sorter is decades past eHarmony’s match making. Netflix can make a queue of movies from tens-of-thousands, but most online services have barely progressed passed proximity and body type. I wonder if tech and the perceived “abundance” of swipe-fodder will push the prioritization down even further as some level of urgency is removed. So far, it feels mostly like they’ve “paved the cow path” and maybe made it easier to find people you were going to find anyway, with limited value-added beyond some unaided search.