Dating has always been bad

Romance is dead – everyone says so. The battle of the sexes has reached a protracted stalemate; “the streets” have become a lonely, foreboding place. Women are identifying as “boy sober”, as though men are a life-ruining addiction, and men are still identifying as incels. If you’re a dating app launching in 2024, you’d better make sure to market yourself as “the dating app for people who hate dating apps”; a demographic which seems to include just about everyone.

But while everyone agrees that romance is dead, there’s still some debate about who killed it: dating apps are the primary suspect; but the finger has also been pointed at the pandemic, for making everyone weirder; and capitalism, which has isolated us into individual units, made intimate attachments of any kind less secure, and deprived us of the resources we need to maintain a relationship – whether that’s somewhere to have sex without annoying your flatmates or Ryanair flights to Marseille.

The cultural narrative around the dating crisis is a response to real phenomena – some combination of the factors above really has made finding a partner more unpleasant in recent years. But if we’re saying that dating is terrible today, what’s our point of comparison? For women who date men, in particular, there’s no golden age to hark back to: dating has always been terrible. By failing to recognise this, we risk misdiagnosing what’s really going on with modern relationships or, worse, being seduced by nostalgic fantasies of a time when the road to love was made more straightforward, but no less hazardous, by financial dependency and social coercion.

According to Shon Faye, the author of The Transgender Issue and the forthcoming Love in Exile, a non-fiction book that explores the politics of love and sexuality, dating apps are an easy scapegoat for a larger and more entrenched set of problems. “The apps are generally boring and repetitive; they flatten people’s personalities and, for women in particular, they lay bare a lot of the misogyny and sexism which was already there. It’s easy to feel frustrated with them, but a lot of critiques of modern dating stop there – and that’s a mistake,” she tells Dazed.

What a lot of people are failing to grapple with, Faye argues, is that there is a crisis of expectation in modern heterosexual dating. This is actually rooted in a positive development: women have a far greater degree of autonomy and self-governance than they did in previous generations. “It hasn’t evaporated completely, but there’s less social pressure on women to get married and have children as soon as possible. This means that more women are seeking reciprocal emotional partnership, and with that there often comes a huge sense of frustration and disappointment. I believe that a lot of younger straight men haven’t been socialised to provide for women materially – which is what their grandfathers understood their role to be – but nor have they been raised to provide the kind of emotional intelligence that women are typically seeking.”

The prevailing narrative about the death of romance often comes hand-in-hand with an idealisation of the past. (It’s no coincidence that the rise of the ‘tradwife’ aesthetic – which appears to offer women an escape from the dissatisfactions of modern life – has emerged within the same period of time.) “Lots of women of our grandmother’s generation did not particularly expect to be happy,” Faye says. “If we’re being blunt, it was probably a good result if you had a man who provided for you and wasn’t abusive – that was a ‘good marriage’ and anything above that was a bonus. The idea that we have today – that you need to find a fulfilling sexual partner, who is also your best friend, your emotional support, and the person who you run your finances and co-parent with – is quite a tall order. Women are now socialised to look for that, and a lot of men seem dumbfounded by that level of expectation.”

“The apps are generally boring and repetitive; they flatten people’s personalities and lay bare a lot of the misogyny and sexism which was already there. It’s easy to feel frustrated with them, but a lot of critiques of modern dating stop there – and that’s a mistake” – Shon Faye

While there used to be intense social pressure on women to get married, this was almost equally as true for men. Being a ‘bachelor’ was never as stigmatised in the same way as being a ‘spinster’, but it didn’t escape disapproval altogether. In the mid-20th century, any man who failed to find a wife by the age of 30 was liable to get called a f*g, and often by the most prestigious medical journals of the day. Society had to put a lot of effort into ensuring that men and women alike would submit to marriage; it didn’t come naturally. But as Barbara Ehrenreich argued in her book, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and The Flight from Commitment, the last decades of the 20th century saw a revolt against the “breadwinner ethic” – the notion that, for a man, the highest purpose in life is to materially provide for his wife and children.

This process was largely driven by men themselves, and while it later dovetailed with the feminist movement, it was rooted in a misogynistic assumption: in the 50s and 60s, men would often complain that stay-at-home mothers others had it too easy, that women were a parasitic class exploiting the labour of their put-upon husbands and ensuring their early death from cardiac arrest. Now that the conservative right typically advocates for a return to the traditional family form, it’s easy to forget that this was an arrangement which lots of men resented at the time – not for nothing is the stifling misery of suburban life one of the most dominant themes of 50s literature. Decades later, it’s still not clear what has replaced the “breadwinner ethic” – as Faye argues, its decline has yet to usher in a golden new age of masculinity.

Straight men, along with COVID-19 and Hinge bios which reference The Office (US), are the great villains of the dating crisis – and not without good reason. After coming across one too many screenshots depicting vicious misogyny, it’s hard not to conclude that some men are entirely deserving of their “loneliness epidemic”. But sexism at its most blatant is not the only part of the dating crisis narrative: there’s also the sense that straight men have become more fickle, unreliable and reluctant to commit. Do they even want to be in relationships any longer? According to journalist Tom Usher, who writes about masculinity (and is straight), it isn’t the case that the social pressure to partner has disappeared entirely or that men have found themselves immune to the allure of romantic love.

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Dating again for the first time after a long relationship, Usher has had a mixed experience. “I do often feel quite lonely, and there seems to be a newer, more blunt way that dating works now, which can be quite confusing,” he says. “I’ve had to learn a lot about being very open with communicating what I want. This can feel quite cold, but I guess it saves everyone a lot of time.” He has found that the level of disposability with which people treat each other has skyrocketed in the seven years since he was last using dating apps. For this development, he blames “internet brain”, and a pop psychology ethos which encourages us to believe that we don’t owe anything to anyone, not even basic courtesy.

As for the declining social pressure for men to settle down, Usher argues that it’s still stronger than you might think. “I am the youngest in my family and the only one out of my five siblings who doesn’t have kids, doesn’t own a house, and isn’t with a partner. When you add in the fact that most of my friends are now having children, it does start to have an effect on your social life; it chips away at the sense you can be young forever and makes you feel like a failure.” He would still like to start a family one day, but only if it’s an expression of love rather than societal obligation. “I’ve thought in the past that a woman could heal me, but I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter how good your partner is – only you can fix yourself, and to put that responsibility onto a marriage, kids or even just a relationship is unfair. But a lot of men do it anyway, because it’s all they know,” he says. This comes back to Faye’s point: it seems that lots of straight men today look to women as a source of salvation – therapist, life coach and sexual partner rolled into one – but whether they are willing to return that effort in kind is a different question.

One of the biggest indications that the dating crisis is really about the dynamic between men and women, rather than modern life more generally, is that it lacks a queer equivalent. Some gay men do like to grumble about “hook-up culture” and open relationships, but we don’t really have a halcyon age of monogamy to mourn. Our complaints about dating are mostly related to the behaviour of men, and there’s no surprise there: gay guys are capable of being every bit as feckless as their straight counterparts. I was curious about where lesbians fit into the narrative: if the death of romance was attributable to digital technology, the pandemic or “late capitalism”, wouldn’t they be in the trenches too? But I’d never heard them complaining about dating in the same way, which seemed like the smoking gun I’d been looking for – positive proof that men are the problem. However according to Daisy Jones, journalist and the author of All the Things She Said: Everything I know about modern lesbian and bi culture, the reality isn’t quite so cut-and-dry. “Emotionally unavailable lesbians definitely exist. Lesbians who ghost definitely exist. And lesbian dating isn’t always the ‘hand-holding into the sun’ that outsiders like to make it out to be,” she says.

On the other hand, the dating crisis narrative does feel like it’s more relevant to her friends that date men. “I think there’s a culture among lesbians to make friends with each other even if things don’t work out romantically, whereas that just doesn’t exist in quite the same way within heterosexual dynamics,” she says. “There’s this vibe of ‘Why would I talk to you if I’m not attracted to you?’ that a lot of men give off, whereas I’m friends with loads of people I’ve been on dates with. Women don’t see each other as either sexual conquests or not worth their time; I think there’s a lot more grey area and wiggle room within queer culture more generally.”

Even if dating has always been bad, that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t gotten worse. But where do we go from here? The dating crisis narrative has been met with a wide range of perky, upbeat solutions: you just need to join a running club, attend a speed dating event, get involved in environmental activism, start cruising, and above all, get off your phone. But without addressing “the crisis of expectation” or the prevalence of misogyny, there’s a danger that women will keep running into the same frustrations. If we want dating to be better, we won’t find the answer by looking back to a time when women had less freedom and men hated them for their dependency.

For most people throughout history, romantic love has never been a durable source of happiness and stability. We might experience this failure as especially acute today, when we have so much less to rely on. There may be less external pressure to settle down, but we live in a competitive and cut-throat world which provides few safety nets, and where the price of failure is often destitution. The sense of loneliness and precarity this engenders creates a pressure of its own, where clinging to the first person who makes us feel secure is not pathetic or shameful, but a strategy for survival. It just isn’t a good one.

“Our depleted social welfare system and our depleted sense of community means that we put a lot of pressure on the romantic couple-form to save us,” says Faye. “It’s held up as a transcendent refuge from our dilapidated social relations, when it’s not – and setting it up that way is a recipe for disappointment.” Maybe in some other world, romantic partnership could reliably fulfil its promises for more than a lucky few, but not in this one. And that’s why I have decided to launch a subversive new dating app for people who understand that love is merely a tool of capitalist oppression.