The situation I have now is probably a better deal for me than the one I would have had a few generations ago. If you are a woman, forget about it. With all the cultural advancements, middle-class and professional women of this era have gained the freedom to have their own lives and careers without the need for marriage. Having a husband and kids isn’t a prerequisite to having a well-rounded, fulfilling adult life anymore. To be clear, I’m not saying that filling that traditional housewife role over being a professional is a bad thing to do today, and I know that the decisions women make about work are complicated. Also, I’m not saying that women who do choose careers hate their kids, etc. Am I clear here? I’M NOT SHITTING ON ANYONE’S LIFE CHOICE (unless the choice is to smoke crack and treat your kids like the Mo’Nique character treats Precious in the movie Precious). But what’s important is that more women than ever are able to make that choice for themselves.
Even if women do make the choice to pursue their careers, the research shows that they still do way more of their share of the domestic work than men (step it up, dudes), but overall they are closer to being equitable partners than they were a few generations ago. They don’t have to settle down at twenty with some bozo who their parents think will be a good match because he has a good job or whatever.
The “good-enough marriage” is definitely not good enough for today’s singles. We’re not content to marry someone who happens to live down the street and gets along okay with our parents.
Sure, there were lots of people in previous generations who met someone in the neighborhood and grew to have a deep, loving soul mate–level bond. But there are many others who didn’t. And the current generation won’t take that risk. We want a soul mate. And we are willing to look very far, for a very long time, to find one.
A soul mate isn’t just someone we love. As for our grandparents, there are probably lots of people out there whom we could settle down with and, in the fullness of time, grow to love. But we want more than love. We want a lifelong wingman/wingwoman who completes us and can handle the truth, to mix metaphors from three different Tom Cruise movies.
Historically, we’re at a unique moment. No one has ever been presented with more options in romance and expected to make a decision where the expectations are so astronomically high. And with all these choices, how can anyone possibly be sure that they’ve made the right one?
Get over it: You can’t! So you just have to power through and have hope that as you grow and mature, you’ll eventually learn to navigate this new romantic world and find someone who does feel right for you.
Technology hasn’t just changed how we find romance; it’s also put a new spin on the timeless challenges we face once we’re in a relationship.
One of the strange things that happens in modern romance is that once you start dating someone, your physical lives aren’t the only things that get entangled; your phone worlds also merge. Today couples have a shared space that they can use for something intimate like sexting. Sometimes this shared phone world is a source of excitement and novelty, but other times the phone world becomes a new source of jealousy. We wind up snooping rather than trusting our special person.
And the fears that make us snoop are valid, because, let’s face it—people cheat. In fact, people make mistakes in relationships all the time. On this issue the United States might be able to learn something from France. I’m not very comfortable with a French woman being forced to live with her husband having a long-term mistress, but I do like that the French are willing to realistically acknowledge the essential fallibility of human nature and the fact that people, despite their best intentions and their love for their partners, do stray. Like Dan Savage (and, to an extent, Pitbull) says, a relationship is bigger than the idea of sexual exclusivity.
Treat potential partners like actual people, not bubbles on a screen.
With online dating and smartphones, we can message people all over the world. We can interact with potential mates on a scale that simply wasn’t conceivable for previous generations. But this shift to digital communication has a powerful side effect. When you look at your phone and see a text from a potential partner, you don’t always see another person—you often see a little bubble with text in it. And it’s easy to forget that this bubble is actually a person.
As we see more and more people online, it can get difficult to remember that behind every text message, OkCupid profile, and Tinder picture there’s an actual living, breathing, complex person, just like you.
But it’s so, so important to remember this.
For one thing, when you forget you’re talking to a real person, you might start saying the kinds of things in a text message that no person in their right mind would ever say to a real-life person in a million years.
If you were in a bar, would you ever go up to a guy or girl and repeat the word “hey” ten times in a row without getting a response? Would you ever go up to a woman you met two minutes ago and beg her to show you one of her boobs? Even if you are just looking for a casual hookup, do you really think this will work? And if so, do you really want to bone someone who responds to this?