What about all our options? We can find the perfect person now, right? The old folks actually saw all this choice as a disadvantage. They expressed sympathy and concern about their children’s situation—and gratitude that things had been simpler, albeit far from perfect, when they were young.
“Something I have to say in defense of the young folks today is that there’s just so many choices out there,” one mom said. “When I was growing up, there was a mixer and there was a bar, and that was about it. But now—my god. I would really hate to be single nowadays.”
“Why do you think it’s so bad for them?” I asked. “Think about all the options young people have now, all the doors that are there for them to open.”
The older folks weren’t buying it. They understood that they had had fewer options when they were growing up, but, intriguingly, they didn’t seem to regret having fewer choices. As one woman explained, “You didn’t think about the choices you had. When you found someone you liked, you jumped into a relationship. I don’t think we thought, Well, there are another twelve doors or another seventeen doors or another four hundred and thirty-three doors,” she said. “We saw a door we wanted, and so we took it.”
Now, look at my generation. We’re in a hallway with millions of doors. That’s a lot of doors. It’s nice to have all those options.
But—a hallway with millions of doors? Is that better? Is it terrifying?
On the one hand, you have so many doors to try. And that sounds better than being shoved into a door when you are really young and maybe not quite ready to be an adult. On the other hand, maybe people in those earlier generations were ready to open a door on their own. After all, think of Amelia, Victoria, and all those other women who were dying to get out of their parents’ houses for good and pretty happy to race into the first door they saw. Sometimes the marriages they raced into wound up being lonely and difficult. But often they blossomed into something loving and fulfilling.
Today we want a bunch of doors as options and we are very cautious about which one we open. The emerging adulthood phase of life is basically a pass society gives you to hang out in the hallway and figure out what door is really right for you. Being in that hallway might be frustrating at times, but ideally you grow and mature, and you find a door that really works for you when you’re ready.
People who are looking for love today have an unprecedented set of options in the search for an amazing romantic partner or, ideally, soul mate. We can marry pretty much whomever we want to, regardless of their sex, gender, ethnicity, religion, or race—or even location. We’re more likely than the generations that came before us to have relationships in which both partners are equals. And, unlike many in prior generations, nearly all of us will only marry someone we love.
The thing is, with all these new possibilities, the process of finding that person can be seriously stressful. And, unlike the days when most everyone got married by their midtwenties, today the search for love can go on for decades.
No more marrying the upstairs neighbor or the girl next door.
No more going steady (forever) with your high school sweetheart.
No more “Hey, Mom and Dad, that person in the living room seems nice. Cool if we get married in three months?”
Instead we have a whole new romantic culture based on an epic search for the right person. A search that can take us through college and various career stages. A search that also takes new forms, because in today’s romantic climate a lot of the action happens on our screens.
PHONE WORLD
In 2014 the average American spent 444 minutes per day—nearly 7.5 hours—in front of a screen, be it a smartphone, tablet, television, or personal computer. That’s higher than the numbers in most European countries, where people spend “only” 5 to 7 hours per day with screens, yet it’s not nearly enough to put the United States in the top five nations: China, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines, and, in first place, Indonesia, where people spend 9 hours per day staring at a screen.8