WHEN I STARTED THIS BOOK, I had a lot of burning questions about modern romance. The shenanigans we all have experienced often left me confused, frustrated, and angry. Trying to find love (or even something casual) in a romantic climate filled with endless scheduling texts and hurdles like Tanya’s “silencing” of 2012 can be a stressful experience.
Then, even after finding a great, healthy relationship with a loving partner, a whole new set of questions arose. I worried about settling down. Should I close all the exciting doors of today’s single world? If things start to feel routine and less exciting, is sexting going to make our romantic life any better? If I suspect that my partner has something going on the side, what are the ethics of looking at her Facebook or phone messages to find out? And if passionate love fades eventually, should I be seeking a long-term, monogamous relationship anyway?
I wrote this book because I wanted to better understand all the conundrums that come up in modern romance. So, after teaming up with an eminent sociologist, interviewing hundreds of people, consulting the world’s foremost experts on romance and relationships, conducting fieldwork in five countries, and reading a mountain of studies and books and news articles and academic papers, what exactly have I learned?
A lot, actually.
Here’s what I took away from this entire experience:
Finding someone today is probably more complicated and stressful than it was for previous generations—but you’re also more likely to end up with someone you are really excited about.
Our search for the right person—and even our idea of what “the right person” actually means—has changed radically in a very, very short amount of time.
If I had been a young person a few generations ago, I would have gotten married pretty young. Most likely, I would have wound up marrying some girl who lived in my neighborhood in my hometown of Bennettsville, South Carolina, around the time I was twenty-three. She would have been even younger, which means she would have been going straight from her father’s arms into mine, with no time to develop or pursue her own interests.
Let’s say her family owned the local Hardee’s franchise.*
Her parents would meet me early on and decide I was a decent guy with a decent job who wasn’t going to murder anyone. We’d set off on a brief period of dating and then get married.
I’d run the Hardee’s and probably be pretty good at it. Maybe I’d catch wind of a guy who was running a huge “biscuit extortion” scam to smuggle biscuits across the border to Georgia. The scam would work like this: The guy and his partner would steal biscuits from our store and then sell the stolen biscuits at a lower cost on the biscuit black market. After getting suspicious of his frequent trips to Georgia, I would hide in the bed of a Ford F-150, under a bunch of biscuits, and when they reached their destination, I’d dramatically pop up and go, “GIMME BACK MY BISCUITS.”
The family would be proud.
Ideally, my wife and I would grow together and have a happy relationship. But maybe, as we grew, we’d become different people and realize the relationship wasn’t working. Maybe my wife would resent her homemaker role and have desires and goals beyond those afforded to women of the era. Maybe I’d be a dissatisfied grump who eventually joined Alfredo in a retirement home where we schemed for doughnuts on the reg.
But I don’t live in that era. When I hit twenty-three, I wasn’t thinking about marriage at all. Instead I got the chance to experience “emerging adulthood” and grow as a person. I met people from all over the world in this part of my life. I wasn’t limited to just the folks I knew in my neighborhood in Bennettsville. So as I grew older, I figured out my career, I dated people in New York and Los Angeles, and eventually I started dating a beautiful chef from Texas whom I met through friends of friends in New York.
We would have never met in previous generations, because I would have been married to the Hardee’s girl and she would have probably been settled down in Texas with some guy she met in her neighborhood, maybe a hot-sauce king named Dusty.* And who knows if we would have even hit it off if we did meet? I became a very different person between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-one.