Throughline - History of the Self: Love
Episode Date: December 26, 2024How did love – this thing that's supposed to be beautiful, magical, transformative – turn into a neverending slog? We went searching for answers, and we found them in surprising places. On today's... show: a time-hopping, philosophical journey into the origins of modern love. (This episode first ran as Love, Throughline)To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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A few years ago, I suddenly found myself single.
I'll spare you all the details, but basically after I figured out how to adjust to my new
reality to co-parent, etc., I started thinking about dating again.
Now imagine, I'm in my 30s, the last time I dated was before dating apps existed, and
I'm going into it with my 20th century sensibilities.
In the beginning, it was brutal.
I couldn't figure out how to match with anyone.
My profile was terrible.
I remember sharing my profile with Run and her just laughing.
It felt so weird swiping on faces like I was shopping for a new drum set.
Sometimes dates would be awkward, probably mostly because of me.
Other times, people would just disappear. Sometimes I'd want to disappear. Of course, probably mostly because of me. Other times people would just disappear.
Sometimes I'd want to disappear.
Of course, it wasn't all bad.
I met some amazing people.
But I always felt like something was off about all of it.
I felt like the search for a partner had been twisted and commodified into this detached
consumer activity.
And I really wanted to know if other people experienced it the
same way I did. So I thought why don't we ask all of you our listeners from all
over the world what your experiences have been with modern love and with
online dating and man did y'all come through.
What was your favorite game on your phone? Um, let's see, Tinder.
No.
No.
No.
Not my type.
It was kind of just like a fun, like, little hot or not little game on my phone.
Logan.
He's Australian.
Not my type.
He's small.
Why is he 6'1"?
I like to say I was playing Tinder.
When you think, oh, I have a Rolodex of people that I'm counting on and meeting.
I have gone to see the Big Lebowski in Athens with a guy I met on an app.
I was just in this forest hiking with this person I just met and I was like, what the
fuck am I doing?
But you don't stop to realize that maybe I am just a person on a lot of other people's
Rolodexes.
They turned into a new form of doomscrolling.
Swipe right, one, two, three.
Chase is not my type.
Four, five.
Ryan not my type.
Jordan, no.
Chevy not my type.
Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five.
I'm about to get arthritis or some sort of disability in my hand.
I literally just swiped through the entire viable boulder population in one sitting.
And I was also thinking, oh my gosh, this is what people are going to do towards me.
I usually only go on these apps now for like 30 seconds at a time before I get distressed.
So it ends up being just this like desert of really shallow initial interactions where you're
just basically window shopping people.
We heard over and over from you, the listeners, these complicated stories of struggling with
dating, with a sense of alienation.
And then when we looked into the data, it actually supports those stories.
Today, the number of young people in America who are single is the highest it's been in
decades.
Despite the fact that meeting someone today doesn't require much more than swiping on
your phone, people who are looking for long-term relationships are lonelier than ever. It's what Nyobi Way, a researcher from NYU,
calls a crisis of connection.
Naturally, I had to ask, why is it like this?
How did love, this thing that's supposed to be beautiful,
magical, transformative, turn into this never-ending slog?
So I did what I do.
I went searching for answers.
And I talked to some of the people who are on the cutting edge of studying the past and
present of love and dating.
This episode is part of our series, History of the Self, where we're exploring the deeply
personal experiences that shape our histories.
Today on ThruLine, I'm going to take you
on a time-hopping philosophical journey
into the origins of modern love.
Hi, I'm Michelle from Kirkland, Washington,
and I'm here with my friend Dina.
Hi, I'm Michelle from Kirkland, Washington, and I'm here with my friend Dina. Hello, I'm Dina from Jordan, Madaba, and I live in Dubai.
And you're listening to The Rewind on NPR.
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Part One.
The Self.
Love.
Love is an encounter.
This is why in English and also in some other languages,
not all like French, you use the term fall.
We fall in love.
I started my journey into the origins of love
with someone whose words
have always resonated with me, the philosopher Zlávoj Žižek. This is him
talking about love on the website Big Think. Let's say you live a happy life.
You are lucky, you have a job, you meet regularly with friends. Then all of a
sudden in a totally contingent way, let's say you stumble on the street, somebody helps you to stand up,
it's a young girl or boy, blah, blah.
And of course, it's the love of your life.
What Zizek is describing
is the idealized Western version of romance.
It's the one where love comes out of passion
and random chance.
The result can be that your whole life changes.
Nothing is the same as they say.
Zizek says that when you fall in love
and get in a relationship with someone,
it naturally rearranges your life.
And that rearrangement can be scary and risky.
Because what if you change everything
and it doesn't work out?
Well, he says to try to minimize the risks of falling in love, we use technology, like
with dating apps, where we can vet partners, like products.
What they offer us is precisely love without the fall, without falling in love.
We want to date the thing without the price we have to pay for it.
We want sugar without calories, so we have sweeteners. We want beer without alcohol.
It fits perfectly this superficial consumerist attitude.
Okay, so I'm not endorsing Zizek or his ideas.
In fact, I'm not even sure if I agree with him here.
Obviously, we're not all engaging in this consumerist way with love, even if society
is pushing us in that direction.
But his provocative point brought up some really fundamental questions for me.
Like where does this idealized version of romantic love come from? Why do we simultaneously idealize it and fear it?
And this sent me down a wormhole for days, weeks. And I eventually landed in an unexpected place.
France in the late 1700s.
The French Revolution is so massive.
This is Andrea Wolff, who wrote the book that took me here.
It's called Magnificent Rebels, The first romantics and the invention of the self.
No one in Europe is really unaffected by this.
The French Revolution tried to end monarchy and feudalism. It tried to end a world of...
Control of despotism and of inequality.
Most people in France and basically everywhere were ruled over by dictators who...
Can determine pretty much every detail in their subject's life.
But the revolutionaries in France didn't just want to take power.
They were trying to completely change the way society worked.
Words are more powerful than weapons.
When the French revolutionaries declare all men equal, they at least promise the possibility
of a society that is built on the power of ideas.
The ideas of the French revolution spread across Europe quickly.
They inspired a movement that would come to be called Romanticism.
Romanticism was this period in Europe where writers, musicians, and artists started emphasizing
the need for individualism and appreciation for the human emotional experience.
And that period is where many historians say the original ideas of modern romantic love
took shape.
Today authors who wrote in English like Mary Shelley,
William Wordsworth, and Edgar Allan Poe are associated with romanticism. But when Andrea
Wolf went looking for the original romantics, she found them somewhere other than France or England.
I came across this story about a group of rebellious young thinkers and philosophers
who all came together at the end of the 18th century in a tiny, and I mean really tiny,
little German town called Jena. That's where romanticism is launched as an international
movement.
Jena was a small college town. Only about four and a half thousand people lived there.
was a small college town. Only about four and a half thousand people live there. But among those people, there were world-class writers and thinkers, the who's who of German
art and literature.
There's the Germany's most famous poet, Goethe. There is the famous playwright, Friedrich
Schiller. You have famous philosophers. you have literary critics,
and they're all incredibly young.
They work together and they love together.
It's just such a mess who's sleeping with whom.
And the person at the center is a woman who, let's just say,
lived an out-of-the-box life.
For me, the most important person in this story, if I can introduce her with all her
names, she's called Karolina Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel Schelling was born in Göttingen, Germany in 1763.
She was the daughter of a university professor and was educated and empowered from childhood.
She grew up to be a very serious intellectual.
She was such a razor sharp mind.
There were quite a lot of intellectuals who said,
I don't ever want to get into an intellectual jewel
with Karolina Schlegel.
She was small and slender,
but had this really big presence.
Everybody talked about how her eyes were like on fire,
and she had these kind of sparkling blue eyes.
She had this kind of mop of kind of big curly hair.
She is fiercely independently minded.
Widowed at 24, she refused to remarry until and unless she wanted to.
She moved to the city where the idea of the French Revolution was gaining support and
threw herself into that world.
She ended up getting imprisoned for her political views.
In prison, she discovers that she's pregnant
after a one-night stand with a 19-year-old French soldier.
Wow.
Quite something at a time when it was scandalous behavior
if you're just on your own with a man.
With the help of friends, she got out of jail and gave birth.
Eventually, she remarried to her second husband,
an intellectual named August Wilhelm Schlegel.
Together, they moved to Jena.
And it's there in Jena that Karolina begins to really shine.
Her personality really determines the kind of rhythm and the tempo of their discussion.
So if they were an orchestra, she's really the conductor who brings the score alive.
Carolina and her friends organized readings, discussions, debates, all inspired by a very basic but revolutionary idea. The self.
So they live in Jena at a time when there is a very famous philosopher called
Fichte and Fichte is so hugely popular that more than half of Jena's students go to his lectures.
So he's the one who puts the self at center stage.
My will alone shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe.
He basically says that there are no God-given or absolute truth. The only certainty we have is we have the self
and that the world is experienced by the self.
A person should be self-determined,
never letting himself be defined by anything external.
At the time, it was such a revolutionary idea
that it's not God or a king who has kind of decided everything.
It is us.
In Germany, it's called the Ich.
Fichte's ideas about the power of the self inspired Karolina and her friends.
As they meet in Karolina's salon, you know, every day, every evening,
that are the ideas they discuss.
They read these lectures because they are published to each other.
They discuss it. They talk about what then becomes romanticism.
The Bohemians in Jena took this idea of the self and used it to develop bigger ideas.
They emphasized sexual freedom. They pushed against the limits of logic and science. They
revered nature and the imagination. And all of this came out in their work.
They published works. They published books. But they also publish a literary magazine called the Atheneum,
a title that stood for freedom, education, liberty.
And Caroline is the editor.
So she has an incredible, powerful role behind the scenes.
And it is in the Atheneum, in the pages of the Atheneum,
that they first use romanticism in its new literary meaning.
Carolina also helped her husband August Schlegel translate 16 of Shakespeare's plays into German.
Those translations went on to become incredibly popular. Meanwhile, the Romantics in England
picked up the baton from the Jena Collective.
Some of them even learned German so they could really understand their ideas.
And it was those English Romantics that really exported the ideas of Romanticism around the
world.
But Andrea Wolff warned me that the early version of Romanticism that was birthed in Carolina's house in Yena and traveled to
England and beyond was...
Very, very different to what we think today of what Romanticism is.
But how is it different from what we think today?
Some people would think about paintings of kind of lone figures in moonlit forests.
Then there are some who would say,
well, the romantics, they all turned against reason
and rational thought, they celebrated irrationality.
And then there are those who will say,
oh, I associate candlelit dinners,
passionate declarations of love.
Now, all of that might be valid today,
but that is not what romanticism originally meant.
So romanticism was something much more complex,
much more unwieldy, and much more dynamic.
According to Andrea, when it came to love, the ideas formed in Jina were about liberation.
It was about fighting against the constraints of Europe's paternalistic culture. It was about the
choice to find romantic love, how and with whom you pleased.
Something that just wasn't possible for most people, especially women, up to that point.
If romanticism is really based also on the idea that there's a free self, then you have
to embrace the other.
Because freedom, that's I think where it all went wrong in our time. So freedom does not mean you can do whatever you want.
For them, free will and freedom always came
with moral obligation, with moral duty.
So freedom comes with its twin.
Right.
If you are truly free and yourself,
that doesn't mean you can trample all over other people.
Not at all.
Selfishness, if you look at its correct historical context,
it's something good.
It means you have a free self.
It's not something bad.
It's just what happens over time with it when we drop
maybe the difficult parts of that, which is, you know, my freedom comes not
at the expense of someone else's freedom.
That's hard work.
And so where does love fit into that view?
Love is at the center of this.
Because in order to love properly,
you need to love yourself and you need to love
the other person and you need to love yourself and you need to love the other person. And
you have to find that balance.
If your head's dead set on finding someone, chances are you're not going to find it. But
once you release that, chances are you're not going to find it. But once you release that, chances are you might find,
you might find someone.
I'd have to step out of my comfort zone in the real world
if I wanted to meet someone.
There's so much pressure to stand out and be amazing
or like, you know, do something weird
or do something memorable.
I think I'm really a fan of just meeting someone naturally,
like in the wild, because then you get a chance to
see them flourish and who they're going to be. It was scary to go out dating and I'm also 64 years old,
so it takes a lot to get to know somebody when you're older. You can find love anywhere. I have
a romantic idea that will be in person, but the more that you think something is going to happen,
the more life will tell you the exact opposite is true.
The story of the Yena Romantics does not end happily. Carolina went into a deep depression after the sudden death of her daughter from illness.
She stopped writing.
And soon, one by one, people would start leaving her home and Yena.
Eventually, Carolina herself would leave.
She died when she was just 46. Until recently, she has not gotten the recognition she deserved
as a contributor to the ideas of Romanticism. But what she and her friends created there
has had a lasting impact for centuries.
If you look at it, these ideas of a liberated self grow out of communal being
that comes out of a group who truly believe that we have to work together.
So for me, the group in Jinnah really gave wings to our together. So for me, the group in Jina really gave wings to our mind. But how
we use those wings, that's up to us today.
Coming up, how the ideas of Romanticism have evolved and twisted into love as a template
from Shakespeare to rom-coms. Hi, this is Stefan, calling from Munich, Germany.
You're listening to Thru Line from NPR.
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Part Two. Love conquers all.
When I met him, I just like knew. I think I may have found someone. I did meet somebody.
My daughter does not know that, but I met somebody who I'm excited about.
We both had a physical attraction, and that was enough to keep it going.
We thought it was going to be nice and chill, and six dates later she's moving to Alabama, and I can't stop thinking about her.
And she tells me, oh, I'm also dating a couple.
I feel like all of my romantic partnerships in the past
that have started in person took like a couple weeks
at least to establish some sort of chemistry.
I met a lot of really good people,
just no one that I could continue on
into a relationship with.
Maybe there's something holding me back from saying,
I wanna find love,
because I think I do want to find love.
Hearing from so many of you, our listeners,
about your experiences with romantic love,
made me think about that earliest version
of romanticism in Yina,
and how it was all about freedom and breaking with the
past and how that has evolved into this paradoxical modern notion of love where we seek an ideal
that may not actually be realistic.
And then I started thinking about all the books and movies and stories I consumed from
childhood and how love was portrayed in those things. And I wanted to understand just how much of that impacted me,
impacted all of our notions of love.
Good morning.
So I called up someone who actually studies that question,
scientifically.
My name is Dr. Veronica Hefner,
and I am an associate professor and director
of the graduate studies in communication at St. Mary's College of California.
Veronica's job is to actually study the psychological impacts of love and romance from the media we all consume.
I specialize in studying the ideal, so the ideal relationship and then also the ideal body, primarily looking at screen media and how screen media can influence
and create relationship expectations, relationship beliefs.
I had no idea before talking to Veronica that you could actually quantify this kind of thing
scientifically.
How does one go about studying the ideal or perceptions about love, et cetera, in a kind
of a quantitative way.
Like you're actually trying to break down
what these impacts might be in a scientific
or uses math to do it.
So what I did was I collected all of those manuscripts
and all of the different people who had written about love
and how they had conceptualized this concept
of romantic ideal
and what did the different facets of that look like.
And so I spent several months, maybe a year, creating my construct of romantic ideal so
that we could understand what does it actually mean.
Okay, so I'm sure we're all generally familiar with the romantic ideals created in films
and books.
You meet someone, they sweep you off your feet, you live happily ever after.
But Veronica actually went through all of this media and defined the romantic ideal
we've all been hit with since childhood.
The romantic ideal consists of four different facets, which are love conquers all, soulmate one and only,
love at first sight, and this idealization of my partner.
Fascinating.
Okay, so let's start with love conquers all.
Love conquers all is the idea that love can conquer anything,
that it doesn't matter what's
keeping that relationship from succeeding or excelling. That no matter
what happens we want to be together. Love will conquer distance, will conquer
political differences. My families are not on the same page, religious beliefs, anything that might keep a pair apart,
the love will conquer that.
And what I found in my research is that that message is the most common takeaway message
of all romantic comedies.
The second most common one is soulmate, one and only, which is that destiny and luck work
in tandem to connect these true lovers and there's only one person out there for you.
Love at first sight tends to be the least common because it's not as oftenly expressed
with words, it's more oftenly expressed with a look or musical transition.
And then idealization of other is this idea that whoever I'm with needs to be perfect.
Like this person is absolutely wonderful, there's nothing wrong with them.
I love you. You complete me.
Like I think about the movie Jerry Maguire, the whole like you complete me, those lines, that narrative,
that really I think affected a lot of us who were teenagers when that movie came out. Because it made it seem like, you know, the way to get someone to love you is to make
a very dramatic gesture.
Most of us are not going to get that.
That's just not reality for the most part.
It's going to be much more subtle than any of these movies portray.
But let's unpack that.
So when you saw Jerry Maguire, think about how old we are.
Think about what part of our life we were and we were learning about relationships we were trying to figure out what does it look like right.
And so we see this is like well i'm learning about love this must be what it is knowing if i watch to learn and knowing that i deals exist and knowing that in over ninety percent of romantic comedies, there is a grand gesture.
We are definitely influenced by these narratives, particularly at certain ages and when we are watching for certain motivations,
which in formidable years, we're probably watching to learn.
formidable years, we're probably watching to learn.
And that goes back even to the earliest movies we probably remember watching,
the earliest stories that were marketed to us.
Think about Disney, that's its own whole thing.
One more way of taking very old stories
and flattening them into nice, palatable,
happily ever afters.
But Veronica's work shows that even if we know that's happening,
even if we understand it on some level, all those hours of
watching all those stories can have a lasting impact.
So I did a study on this where I created some hypothetical
online dating profiles.
And I made everything online dating profiles.
And I made everything identical across the profiles to reduce the variance.
But the only thing I changed was in the descriptions
whether or not they mentioned an ideal concept.
So, like if they said,
I'm looking for my soulmate.
Or, I try to be the perfect girl, I'm looking for my soul mate, or I try to be the perfect girl,
I'm looking for the perfect guy.
And what I found was that the profiles
that had those tidbits of romantic ideal statements
in them were rated more attractive
than the dating profiles that didn't mention that.
And then I found on top of that, more attractive than the dating profiles that didn't mention that.
And then I found on top of that, that the people that found those profiles the most attractive were the same people who were consuming more romantic screen media outside of this experiment.
You.
I can't give you a blanket, watch a rom-com, you'll believe this, but what I can say is, watch a lot of romantic comedy,
now you're going to go into a dating situation and you're going to be looking
for those romantic ideals because you've seen them and heard them in these films.
So we met for the drink and ended up hanging out at that bar for hours, just talking.
And kind of just like went out and had this wonderful night,
like exploring Stockholm with her.
I did actually end up hooking up with this man last night.
I regretted it. I regret it. I do. I don't know why I did it.
I'm catching myself grinning at my phone like a fool when he texts me,
and I haven't felt that way in years.
The conversation with Veronica Hefner haunted me for weeks.
The conversation with Veronica Hefner haunted me for weeks. I always had this sense that the messages I'd received from films had impacted me on
some level, but the more I unpacked what my notions of love are, I realized that the ideas
of liberation and freedom of romanticism had been cycled through films which are a reflection
of our culture, but also of our economic system and those things might have really messed up how I view love
Because in the end they're made to make money and maybe their messages are what send us into a search for a love
That doesn't really exist and maybe it's that expectation that fuels the searching and swiping and the sense of
loneliness many of us feel.
Coming up, we're going on the apps.
Hi, this is Jeremy Whitford calling from Darrow, North Carolina. Part 3.
When Harry Swiped on Sally.
Okay, at some point while I was making this episode, I sort of lost my mind and couldn't
stop imagining what all the
past romantics would have made of dating apps today. I know, I torture myself with thought
experiments. But I became obsessed with comparing what my experiences were on the dating apps
with other people. So it seemed like an obvious choice to ask our resident Gen Z producer
Anya Steinberg to report on the apps.
But I found out quickly there was a problem.
I've actually never been on the apps before.
Really?
Yeah.
How old are you?
I know, I know.
I've only ever been on an app
when I'm like watching my friends swipe over their shoulders
and it's super entertaining.
But the world is completely foreign to me.
I've never set up a profile, I've never downloaded one.
And so, you know, I'm a serious journalist.
So I thought if I'm gonna understand what it means
to date in the world of algorithms,
I need to talk to someone who knows.
So she turned to an app she did know, Instagram,
to find people who had been on the apps
that could give her kind of a lay of the land.
It took me about 20 minutes to make this because I'm so bad with technology.
I was trying to put together just like a text box and a picture, but I put out a call out
on my story and I said, basically, like, do you have a story about dating app?
I want to hear it.
The good, the bad, the ugly, anything you want to say about them.
My Ds are open
So what was the response like it was?
crazy
My phone was blowing up all day pretty much immediately really and out of all the people I talked to there was one woman
Who I feel like what she said about it really stuck out to me. My name is Emma
I use she her pronouns and I'm in Seattle.
And by the way, we're just using her first name
since she's talking about her dating life
to hundreds of thousands of people.
So how does Herrick's journey with apps start?
She had been on the apps on and off for like several years.
She got on them in college when she was abroad.
I think the first one I downloaded was Tinder,
like that, I don't think Hinge had broken in yet.
So it was, I downloaded Tinder,
it was very much like a picture focused,
I think with like a very minimal bio at the time.
I said something like, I like to drink wine,
teach an American about your country or something.
When she got back to the States, it was basically COVID.
And she got on the apps again to just, you know,
swipe on people in a very non-committal way,
which I think a lot of people were doing at the time.
They were lonely, feeling isolated.
Right, right. But there had to be something about,
well, you know, using the app that kept her going back to it.
What was that?
There were positive parts.
Like Emma is queer, and so it was like a good way for her
to like come into that identity
and explore her sexuality in like a low risk way.
At the very beginning, I feel like I was a little naive
and wide-eyed and just like, oh my gosh, this is so fun.
I have this potential of meeting this person
and maybe we'll connect.
After like a year into it was when I started
to kind of roll my eyes whenever I was going
on a first date and it sort of became this like laborious
thing where it
was like okay am I going to feel like I wasted my time will you respect me like let's see how this
goes she was saying it's like it's like this endless cycle wow yeah she expressed feeling
this anxiety that like at every moment she could be finding love.
Something that would keep me going is I'd be like,
oh, someone new is moving to the city.
You never know.
You never know who tomorrow will be there.
I was like, oh my God.
My feeling is that dating is a wasteland.
Yeah, I mean, how do we get to a point where it feels so lonely?
My name is Maura Weigel.
I'm an assistant professor at Northeastern University and currently at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Maura wrote a book called Labor of Love, the Invention of Dating.
And I wanted to talk to her because she started researching dating in the early 2010s, right
when dating apps were first becoming mainstream.
And there was a lot of speculation at that time about whether or not dating apps meant
the end of love as we knew it.
But what I realized as soon as I started to dig into the historical record was that sort
of in the DNA of dating is a sense of crisis about courtship.
There's never been a moment when there wasn't a kind of moral panic going on about dating.
You use the term moral panic, which is interesting to me, because there's an implication of a
some moral system in there being violated.
At the very beginning, it's about women in the city
earning their own money and either living on their own
or going out on their own.
The word date, the first time it's thought to appear
on the historical record in English,
used in the way that we use it now, is 1896.
Before that, if you think of the Jane Austen ideal,
it's like courtship was something where someone came
to your family home, or maybe it happened at your church
or your temple or in a kind of community space.
This very idea of dating is tied to working class people
and immigrants who are pouring into American cities
in unprecedented numbers in the 1890s.
People who do not have space to have people
to their home, maybe don't have family around to watch them, and above all, with women who
have to work outside the home to make money.
And the reason you need to set a date is because you can't assume that woman would just be
hanging at home with her aunt waiting to meet you if you were to turn up.
Maura says that many people saw dating as something almost like prostitution.
Women going on dates would be targeted by police and sometimes arrested.
A lot of the historical records Mara found on the early days of dating were police records
and vice reports.
That sounds crazy to us, I think.
But in that moment of the early 1900s, there was no precedent for a woman going out with a stranger who
is going to exchange money for attention and affection of some kind.
Does it evolve?
Yeah.
Let's say over the next decade, does it evolve a little bit out of this traditional moral
like, oh, there's like, you know, and I'm using air quotes here, loose women out on
the run, like in the cities.
Does it evolve a little bit more into some other kind of traditionalist critique of dating?
Yeah, constantly. It really co-evolves with consumer capitalism and youth culture. One
detail I loved from research from the 1920s that continued into the 1950s had to do with
the amount of concern that parents, authorities, college deans, even judges,
felt about the automobile as a technology
that was letting young people be together in new ways.
And there's a whole book that was about young people
socializing and a lot about dating,
but it had a long section on the car,
and the fact that it was dangerous
that this new technology let young people move around
and spend time
together. You flash forward to the 1950s, there's a total panic about this practice of so-called going steady." This type of discourse was really only concerned with heterosexual couples. There
was a parallel moral panic at the time over homosexuality, one that led to queer people
being arrested or fired from their jobs. But the panic over homosexuality, one that led to queer people being arrested or fired from
their jobs.
But the panic over teenagers going steady was really centered around a fear of young
men and women seeing each other casually and maybe even having premarital sex, all without
the end goal of marriage.
The rise of people going steady went hand in hand with the economic boom of the 1950s, a time when
life, at least for white Americans, was more prosperous than ever before.
And there's all sorts of really concrete ways this mattered, like teenagers no
longer had to work outside the home to help support their family as much.
There's this whole middle class of teenagers whose parents can afford to
give them allowances. And I tend to think of going steady in the 50s as an expression related to this new kind
of consumer culture, where going out for a milkshake or whatever it is, is very tied
to, if not liberation, a certain vision of consumer fulfillment.
The mythology is that that is available
to the entire middle class, to a mass audience.
It's this idea that everyone could afford
to go out for a milkshake.
Right, yes.
I don't think history works exactly
like someone in the background planning that,
but it is an engine for mass consumption going steady.
I'd say you can make similar arguments
about online dating
in the sense that dating is like the democratization of excess.
And I don't use excess in a bad way.
I mean it like in a material way.
Like it's an excess of like sexuality and romance
and these feelings that used to be only available
to the people who are very rich.
Now it's like, you know, Becky and Brad
can go out for a milkshake and like make out, you know, Becky and Brad can go out for a milkshake and like,
make out, you know, at the drive-in movie theater.
In a way, that kind of leads us to today.
Let's talk about the rise of online dating, at least on the phone.
Once dating or access to potential partners became something you could access on this
device you had with yourself at all times, what does that transition do from an economic
and also social perspective?
The transition to the mobile phone app was crucial in a couple ways.
When the internet stops being this other place that you go through the portal of your computer, you know, it stops being
cyberspace and
Increasingly is just interwoven with every single aspect of physical reality and everyday life
You start seeing apps like Grindr. I think in 2009 these apps allowed
LGBTQ people to meet others in their area
Which if you lived in a place without gay bars or
where you may have felt unsafe to be out as queer, that was revolutionary. Soon, apps
like Grindr had mainstream copycats. In 2012, Tinder and Hinge launched. Then, Bumble followed
in 2014.
Dating becomes this thing you can do on your phone all the time, just like you do everything
else all the time on your phone. You know, just like you do everything else all the time on your phone.
Just like you order food through your phone.
It's sort of where everything happens,
and it's where dating happens too.
And I think that has a lot of different cultural consequences.
We could think about how the way that this technology
disembeds social relationships.
Can you talk more about that?
Yeah, in a way we could think about this longer history as the history of disembeds social relationships. Can you talk more about that? Yeah, like in a way we could think about this longer history as the history of disembedding,
that it's like, okay, Jane Austen, parlor, you're in a very tight-knit familial space.
Then think about that migrating into your neighborhood bar,
or like your college campus, or your workplace.
That encounter is like integrated in other social relationships.
But what apps do is they disembed us further.
Now you can just meet someone extensively outside of any social context like that.
So there's something very disorienting about that.
I do think there's something weird and dystopian about putting us into our own little separate pods
that are these devices and an algorithm essentially linking
us up into these mating pairs.
And that kind of disembodiment from the collectivist
human experience and into one that is like hyper
individualistic seems to me to be the source
of the loneliness.
Because what I'm seeing is people who want
long-term partnership find that taking that
next step is difficult because of the market kind of nature of the app.
But there's always a better choice out there.
There's this paradox of choice element.
It's funny, I'm a German speaker and there's a saying in German, Kva De Val, which means
like the pain of choice, which we don't have a good phrase that rhymes like that for in
English.
But at risk of stating
the obvious, the economic incentives of a dating app are to keep users playing the app,
not to get off the app.
And so there's a sort of fundamental misalignment there.
Can you talk a little bit more about what that economic incentive is to keep people
on the apps and like how that works. So how apps make money, for the most part,
is that they gather data on users,
which they can either package in various ways
to sell to advertisers,
or they can convince investors
that it's useful for some other purpose.
I mean, we all know this about Facebook now, right?
Like, the customer of Facebook is not the user,
it's advertising companies.
The customer is the product, basically.
Our social interactions are the product.
And this is true of lots of dating apps as well.
And to that extent, it's in their interest for us all to keep swiping.
Some of these psychoanalyst philosophers like Slavoj Žižek, they all make this point, which is that,
in our modern capitalist society,
we want like the Coke with no sugar.
We want these things that feel good
without the cost they come with.
And I think it's also risk minimization, weirdly,
meaning that like many people are happy to get attention
on their apps without having to make the cost
and the effort of like getting dressed and going out and meeting someone and risking being rejected,
et cetera, that it kind of pushes us in a weird way to be less, to experience less romance
and less pressure, even though that's what the stated purpose of them is.
I think there's certainly an element of truth to the sort of pessimism that what ends up happening is that people
have a sort of simulation of experience that actually not only doesn't lead to what they
supposedly want but actively prevents it.
I feel like another kind of type I encountered a lot in my research was the person, usually male, although not always, who had
assembled like an Excel table and was like, I'm going to go on 12 dates a day on the weekend
and like amass all this data and was like, seemed sort of unable to actually be present
with anyone in a way that would enable him to form the kind of connection he said he
wanted.
So yeah, I think what interests me now
is seeing what people can do beyond this depressing,
narrow shopping for a date mindset,
beyond the efficiency mindset.
There was a day when I was doing research for my book
where I just happened to interview
a Harvard Business School professor,
who now has tenure, and a sex worker on the same day.
And it was funny to me because they both said the exact same thing.
And I was like, here are two people who have, let's say, different empirical backgrounds
have like deep knowledge about dating and how people make matches.
What did they say?
They both said the algorithm doesn't work. It's like the
algorithm can be useful for sorting out people who like have some deal-breaker
where it's never gonna work with that person, but after that first level
sorting function the algorithm is not very good at figuring out who's gonna
click. And that rings true to me. You know as you said we're animals and we have a
lot of mechanisms for figuring out who we like.
And apps have figured out how to encode only a few of them.
["Sweet Home"]
Obviously, a natural question for me is, like, what now?
If the apps don't radically change or get better,
how are we going to access like all those other parts of human connection
that an algorithm obviously just like can't master?
Yeah. I mean, I think those are the same kind of questions
that Emma was facing after years of being on these apps.
It's it's that same dread of like, how is this endless cycle going to get any better?
The time that I spent scrolling was time I could've been
like loving myself and doing things I actually wanted to.
And there was one day where she was sitting
with her friends and she's like,
guys, I think I'm gonna delete the apps again.
And they were kind of like, okay, Emma,
you'll be back on them next week.
Like, we've heard this one before.
Of course.
And she told me she's a very stubborn person.
So that kind of really rubbed her the wrong way.
And she was like, what do you mean?
Like, you know what?
Actually, like, fuck you guys.
I'm going to stick to this.
I'm never going on them again.
And so did she do it?
Did she actually quit?
Yeah, she was off them for a whole year.
And at the end of the year, she was, she was with her friends and she was like,
guys, it's been a year. And they were like, oh, great.
So are you going to redownload them? And she was like, no.
And after like two months, it got really easy.
The sound so cheesy.
The world just got more beautiful
after I deleted the dating apps.
Life has gotten more fun.
People would ask, you know,
are you putting yourself out there?
And I'm like, well, I'm not not,
but like I'm existing.
During the process of making this episode, I found my emotions and perspectives on dating all over the place.
I kept finding myself coming back to Slavoj Žižek's assertion that we want love without
the fall.
We want the benefits of partnership without the sacrifices it requires.
Now I think there's definitely some truth to that,
but I also think that dating apps, although well-intentioned when they were created,
have served to paradoxically make romantic love more elusive.
Yet, the ideas of romanticism and the evolution of dating all have a deeper historical purpose,
and that is the human desire for passion and partnership.
We are constantly striving to break free from the traditions of the past and create new
ones.
And so, I leave this story hopeful and with a belief that the dating of the future will
break from what feels like the gridlock of the moment and that ultimately finding love
might just be a little bit better than it is today.
["Find Love"]
And that's it for this week's show.
I'm Randab Del Fattah.
I'm Ramtin Arab-Louis, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
This episode was produced by me.
And me and.
Lawrence Wu.
Julie Kane.
Anya Steinberg.
Casey Miner.
Christina Kim.
Devin Kadiyama.
Peter Balanon-Rosen.
Thomas Liu.
Irene Noguchi.
And a huge thanks to the many of you who responded to our call out about love and relationships in the digital world.
We absolutely couldn't have made this episode without you.
Thank you to Big Think for letting us use their interview with Slavoj Žižek in this
episode.
Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Bokal.
The episode was mixed by Josh Newell,
thanks to Johannes Dergi, Kara West,
Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.
Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin
and his band, Drop Electric, which includes
Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara.
And next week in our series, The History of the Self, we take on aging and one man's
quest to end it forever. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at
thruline at npr.org.
Thanks for listening.