If you’re single and looking for everlasting love, you might be frustrated — especially if you’ve been at it for a while.
You might feel like the odds are stacked against you. Dating culture is a mess (a fair point) and dating apps are a meat market. Self-hep authors and YouTube gurus make bank by listing everything wrong with you and offering pseudoscience-based solutions that only make you feel worse about yourself. (There are serious books written by serious clinical psychologists, but you’re not reading those, are you?)
You can rage against dating culture all you want. You can rage against dating apps and self-help books that tell single women of a certain age what they’re doing wrong, and why they can’t get a man. But you can’t forget it takes two to tango, and if there are a lot of single people out there, it’s because both men and women aren’t committing to each other as they used to in decades past.
Let’s face it, marriage isn’t a top priority anymore. It isn’t as socially enforced as it used to be back in the days when there must be something wrong with you if you were unmarried by age 30.
There’s a good side to this cultural shift. In decades past, people who were unsuited for marriage would have found a way to do it regardless, happiness be damned. Now, people who aren’t marriage-oriented are choosing to stay unapologetically single. Increasingly, marriage is for the marriage-minded only, and it has never been easier to say, “That’s not for me.”
The downside is, that as marriage falls from grace, so do other forms of commitment.
Marriage is the first piece in the domino-row of committed love. As it falls, it brings down all the other pieces with it. Since marriage isn’t a sacred, socially enforced goal anymore, neither are any of the other stages of a relationship that used to lead to marriage, namely dating, an exclusive relationship, and an engagement.
In the Western world, it’s never been more socially acceptable to say you’ll never marry; it’s never been more socially acceptable to go through a period of trial and error before settling down (if you ever do); and it’s never been more socially acceptable to break up a marriage (if you ever get that far). That’s not to say a few people won’t silently (or loudly) judge you for your choices, but the number is far smaller than it would have been only a few decades ago. As a consequence, most forms of love have become increasingly more fickle.
This isn’t about dating apps. Our behavior on dating apps is nothing more than a symptom of what we experience in society. It all easily adds up to dating fatigue, to a sense of collective heartbreak that leads us to raise walls between ourselves and other humans, avoiding commitment both because it’s not expected of us and because it can lead to incredible pain.
As a result, we adapt to single life to the point of getting attached to the lifestyle. It becomes hard to let go — partly because of how risky it is do give it up.
Both single men and women are taking a license to feel overwhelmed. They already handle daily life: work, household maintenance, aging parents, sometimes children from a previous relationship, and at the end of the day, all they want to sit back on the couch and watch TV, not put in effort into yet another relationship that may or may not go somewhere.
They have taken the time to learn how to be fine on their own. Unless companionship comes naturally (which is hardly ever the case), they don’t want or need the trouble that goes into learning how to be with someone — let alone someone who might be gone in a few weeks or months.
Single people, especially those over 30, aren’t in a rush to drop everything and completely rearrange their schedules to fit in a hot date. They’re too set into their routines by now, and they know whatever hot date they have coming up isn’t likely to be their last, so Thursday night yoga class takes precedence. Friday poker night with the guys is more important than grabbing last-minute drinks with someone they just matched with. Having Sunday brunch with the girls well-rested and fresh feels better than staying up late and endlessly texting someone you met online in an effort to get to know them better.
A relationship will have to wait until they can find the time. They fit in love with their busy schedules, not the other way around.
Love — as in the everlasting kind in a committed relationship — isn’t a priority anymore. Not like it used to be.
The priority is their career, their next vacation, their plans for retirement — or all of the above.
Single men and women over 30 mistrust love at some level. They mistrust how fleeting it is these days, and how one small mistake can cost everything. They despise feeling like they’re walking on eggshells, so they turn towards a different path. A path filled with friends, passion projects, and travel. A path they can form reasonable expectations of, and trust they won’t get too lost in the way — and in case they do, at least there will not be the pain of heartbreak.
You can rage against dating apps all you want, but they’re not causing the disease, they are merely symptoms. They are the symptoms of a society that doesn’t push for commitment anymore (for good and bad), that tolerates long periods of trial and error in people’s love lives (again, for good and bad), and that isn’t comfortable with heartbreak (or the risk of heartbreak) anymore.
Many singles find “just learn how to be happy by yourself” to be a simplistic, unsatisfying solution to a problem that pains them deeply, but many have taken the destigmatization of singlehood as an opportunity to build a happy, fulfilling life without a partner.
Either way, there are no easy answers to the confusing state of our relationships today. Deleting all dating apps from your phone might be a short-term solution for you, but the overall landscape won’t change unless we all reevaluate our values.
As a mid-50s single person, this is one of the best and most accurate assessments I’ve read in a long time about it.