We Are All in Situationships

Complaints about the current state of dating tend to revolve around the impersonal, gamelike behavior that apps such as Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble encourage. In theory, sifting through hundreds of profiles within minutes is supposed to be a convenient means of finding the perfect partner you may never have bumped into offline—or a lively, empowering way to occasionally dip into the dating pool without making any serious commitment. But in reality, the process of searching for your best-possible, most optimized match is often fundamentally at odds with the curiosity and consideration that meaningful romantic connections require.

It’s also, for a lot of young people, a minefield of conflicting expectations. Dating apps rose to prominence around the same time as girlboss feminism, which championed the high-powered (and often single) career woman. It was—and, in many ways, still is—a strange cultural climate for single women who openly want romantic relationships. Singledom and swiping are supposed to be fun, a promise that relies on a somewhat paradoxical assumption: You will eventually find someone to settle down with—but only if you’re not asking too much of men or taking yourself too seriously. Meanwhile, the social pressure for women to be partnered, and to have children, didn’t actually disappear from the workplace or from other spheres of life.

More than a decade into the widespread usage of smartphone-based dating services, marriage is on the decline, a trend that lawmakers and pundits loudly decry. But however tempting it might be to fault “the apps” alone for the demise of romance, two new books suggest that it’s far more complicated than it seems. The books—both, as it happens, called The End of Love—examine the social and political fault lines, some of them formed decades or centuries ago, that have led to modern fissures between men and women. To close the gap, they argue, we’ll need to change our approach to all loving relationships—not just romantic ones between two straight people.

Before the notion of romantic love became popularized, marriage was largely considered a pragmatic union between two families. In her book, the American sociologist Sabrina Strings traces the origins of the “Romantic Ideal,” the 12th-century European tales of knights and the ladies they rescued—amorous fantasies that often hinged on a heroine’s powerlessness, and later inspired the bodice rippers that once dominated the romance genre. It wasn’t until the 18th century, and the radical social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, that the Romantic Ideal became “one of the driving imperatives for courtship, and ultimately, marriage among Western Europeans,” as Strings writes.

But even after this change, the idea that women entered relationships freely was a convenient fiction: Sacrificing oneself for love, writes the Argentine journalist Tamara Tenenbaum in her book, was “supposedly … the only possible path toward a meaningful life and toward transcendence.” Women weren’t often offered other avenues to become their full selves; there is no archetypal “female version of James Dean,” in part because women faced dangerous repercussions for social rebellion. The Romantic Ideal stemmed from complex, oppressive conditions in which women had little agency, meaning they required liberation from their circumstances. (Not until 1974 could women in the United States get credit cards in their own name.) Many marriage conventions developed within this dynamic of forced economic dependence on men. Consider how uncommon it is, even now, for a married man to take his wife’s last name, whereas about eight in 10 women who marry men still change theirs.

Today, many young people attempting to date don’t face expectations that fall neatly along these traditional lines, because some of the egalitarian principles championed by feminists and LGBTQ activists are more commonly accepted now than they were in the 20th century. But part of what makes finding romance so difficult is that cultural messaging has shifted in other ways—and not equally across demographics. Many young men online are finding a world of ultra-popular right-wing influencers who rose to internet fame by posting misogynistic tirades—part of the backlash to women becoming more outspoken about their discontent.

These online personalities prime their young male listeners for political radicalization by stoking their dating-related anxieties, in some cases suggesting that many women want men only for their money—and caution their followers against investing emotionally or financially in their romantic prospects. Young men are, on the whole, shifting further to the right. And it’s not just the internet that’s fomenting these tensions: In the United States, where recent polling suggests that young women’s political preferences are trending to the left, there are clear signs that the growing political divide between men and women is partly due to recent changes in legislation that restrict family-planning options. (It doesn’t help that some conservative lawmakers have also begun to challenge no-fault divorce laws.)

One of the most salient threads of Tenenbaum’s book is a peculiar anxiety that many Millennial and Gen Z women are now wrestling with, as an indirect result of social movements that rocked the 20th century (and, later, #MeToo). In many countries, women are now legally permitted to work, own property, and open bank accounts without a father or husband’s permission. Many girls and young women know, at least intellectually, that romance isn’t their only path to living their best life. And yet, young women born into this world of relative freedom still inherit some of the same social conditioning as their forerunners.

The specifics of feminist struggle have changed since the 1960s, Tenenbaum writes, but “the conceptual engine of romantic love is in excellent working condition.” This sticky notion of romance as a prerequisite for “having it all” creates an existential dilemma for women who want to marry a man one day, especially the many who hope to become mothers: Even with the advent of assisted reproductive technologies, there’s a limited biological window for women to find a partner who also wants those things. Condescending platitudes about how fun singledom can be, or how important it is to love yourself, fail to address most women’s real concerns.

In some of her book’s most interesting passages, Tenenbaum writes candidly about the strangeness of seeking love as an educated, ostensibly feminist woman. Her upbringing in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires didn’t shield her from the secular world’s cultural messaging that casts romance, not just marriage, as the most meaningful pursuit for girls and women. Despite feeling satisfied with her friendships and career, she wasn’t immune; it’s one thing to intellectualize the pitfalls of romance, but actually rejecting its allure is something entirely different.

Tenenbaum recalls allowing men in clubs to mistreat her and doing “many things I didn’t want to do so that my boyfriend would not leave me”—seemingly an allusion to consensual but unwanted sex. “Those of us who have given ourselves to love imagined that by giving a man all our energy and time … we’ve done something completely different to those women who married for convenience or obligation,” she observes of herself and many friends. They believed they were pursuing something more immaterial, and even spiritual—but instead they were “simply using different language to mask the material, financial and political exchanges at play.” It might be easy to disparage the housewives and arranged marriages of prior generations, but Tenenbaum’s introspection leads to a thornier conclusion: Modern relationships, too, are fueled by unequal conditions that are seldom recognized.

These passages register as earnest, critical assessments of what can happen when young people internalize the wildly conflicting messages they receive from elders, popular culture, and, of course, the internet. It is, in a word, exhausting for many women to be simultaneously tasked with seeking out love and pretending that it doesn’t take labor to do so. At one point, Tenenbaum cheekily observes that on Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle platform, “the section dedicated to ‘relationships’ is under the ‘work’ tab.” (“Relationships” has since been relisted under “Wellness.”) To give readers sharper language for the experiences they might be contending with, Tenenbaum extensively cites the work of academics, journalists, and authors, such as the Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener, whose powerful essay “The Sex of Survivors” talks about reclaiming pleasure after sexual trauma.

[Read: How should feminists have sex now?]

More than any study, these analyses and personal reflections illustrate the painful feelings that accompany many women’s romantic and sexual encounters—and suggest that there’s no meaningful way forward without acknowledging the roots of those emotions. As Tenenbaum writes, “It’s not singlehood, dear friend, that hurts; it’s not casual sex, the fluidity of our bonds, nor their ephemeral nature that causes pain.” Rather, it’s the way that power operates in relationships. Desire isn’t a spontaneous, apolitical passion; it’s shaped by the world around us, and by what we’ve been taught to value. Romance operates like a market, in other words, one in which some people have far more buying power than others.

In the face of this deeply felt conundrum, most modern dating advice simply urges women to work harder at asking for less from men. Girls and women learn to devalue the other relationships in their lives, discouraging them from investing in equally valuable connections. Both Tenenbaum and Strings suggest that we might all be better off if coupledom were less compulsory in the workplace and other important social spaces: How many people, especially women, have been trapped in bad relationships because of social pressure, punitive laws, or a lack of money? How much freer and safer might the world be for them, and for children, if it were easier to build a life that doesn’t hinge on whether a man finds you suitable to marry?

One idea, they suggest, is to refocus our relationships on care rather than romantic love. Both authors take cues on this idea from marginalized communities, such as queer people in their respective countries, for whom coupledom has been just one of many important social institutions. Where Strings and Tenenbaum differ is in their perspective on how the pressure cookers of online dating, social media, and economic repression affect different social groups. Strings spends much of her book outlining how racism has excluded Black and other “insufficiently white” women from being seen as worthy of love and partnership, connecting the physical preferences articulated by many men (including Black men) to antebellum propaganda meant to dehumanize Black people. “Beauty was (and still is) regulated by the terms set forth in race science: tall, straight hair, fair skin, slender build,” she writes. These historical forces undergird many of the interactions Black women have when attempting to date online, and even explain the predatory glut of relationship self-help books marketed to Black women.

[Read: What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life?]

By contrast, Tenenbaum’s book never meaningfully acknowledges how foundational race is to desire. In a chapter where she identifies the exhausting imperative for women to “embody the hegemonic beauty standards,” she glosses over a racial hierarchy that isn’t relevant only in the United States. Former Argentine President Alberto Fernández once claimed that his citizens descend from those who arrived on “boats … from Europe,” but Afro-Argentines have a long, complex history in the country that this popular mythology belies. This omission of Black (and Indigenous) Argentines by an Argentinean writer is a noticeable lapse in a book that is otherwise remarkable in its ability to name the amorphous discomforts of modern love—and in its author’s willingness to imagine new ways of relating to one another. She does, for example, write compellingly about the ways that queer communities have modeled care and love outside the confines of romance—for instance, by maintaining healthy relationships with former partners.

There are other ways to prioritize platonic bonds without cozying up to your exes. But what Tenenbaum is exploring in her writing is the idea that love isn’t confined to the kinds of relationships that tend to be signifiers of social status. Most people will never marry a friend they have no interest in sleeping with, but that doesn’t mean we can’t reconsider the impulse to subordinate all our relationships to the ones that involve sex or romance. We can still share our homes, help raise one another’s children, and care for one another in old age.

These conclusions probably won’t be satisfying to people most concerned with preserving the institution of marriage. But Tenenbaum and Strings each gesture toward a world that frees heterosexual people, even married ones, to seriously reckon with—and establish deep connections beyond—the insularity of the family unit. Forging a path to that world may be more arduous than trying to revive mid-century marriage rates, but unburdening marriage of all its baggage could make the decision to wed all the more joyful. As Tenenbaum writes, “The couple can only be saved if we decenter it … And, more importantly, because crucially, I don’t care about saving the couple: with great love, friendships, communities, and luck perhaps we can at least manage to save ourselves.” Perhaps, if love as we know it is over, there might be something even more wondrous awaiting us.