Throughline - Love, Throughline

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

We asked you to call us with your stories of looking for love in the 21st century — and man, did you come through. We heard the whole range of human experience in your stories, but one theme rang out loud and clear: dating, and especially online dating, is a struggle.The data backs this up. 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.Why is it like this? How 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.Correction: An earlier version of this episode incorrectly said that the Jena Romantics shared a house for 10 years. In fact they lived and worked in close proximity, occasionally cohabitating, for approximately five yearsLearn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Every year around this time, my inner Larry David comes popping out because of Valentine's Day. Now, I know I'm not original in feeling this way, but Valentine's Day is kind of like the worst

of the modern manufactured holidays because it's a day when we're all reminded of ideal love stories, when we're pushed to express romantic love in scripted ways where it kind of just all feels forced. But for most of my life, I think this was just me being a curmudgeon, just being who I am. I don't think I started to actually understand the deeper reasons for why I dislike Valentine's Day so much until a few years ago. I suddenly found myself single after separating from my partner, a partner who I share a child with. 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, 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, kind of like what we did to love with Valentine's Day.

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. Um, let's see, Tinder. No. No. No. Not my type.

It was kind of just like a fun, like, little hot or not, um, little game on my phone. Logan. He's Australian. Not much height. He's small. Why is he 6'1"? I like to say I was playing Tinder. And you think, oh, I have a Rolodex of people

that I'm counting on and meeting. I've 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. It turned into like a new form of doom scrolling.

Swipe right, one, two, three. Chase is not my type. Four, five. Ryan not my type. Jordan, no. Chevy not my type. 22, 23, one, two, right, three. Chase is not my type. Not my type. Four, five. Ryan, not my type. Jordan, no. Chevy, not my type. 22, 23, 24, 25. 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 Niobe 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. On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, 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. And you are listening to Superline on NPR. Ah! This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally,

and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York,

working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. 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 Zlavoj 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 Žižek 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. Žižek 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 promised 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 Wolfe 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 live there. But among those people, there were world-class writers and thinkers, the who's who of German art and literature. There's 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 Karoline Michaelis Böhmer Schlegel Schelling. Karoline 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 duel 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 organize readings, discussions, debates, all inspired by 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 that 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 publish works. They publish books.

But they also publish a literary magazine called the Athenaeum, a title that stood for freedom, education, liberty. And Carolina is the editor. So she has an incredible, powerful role behind the scenes. And it is in the Athenaeum, in the pages of the Athenaeum, 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, I mean, 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, is 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 have to find that balance. Love. Love. Listen.

Encourage. Therefore, we fall in love. 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 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 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 Yina 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 Yina. 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 Jena 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 ThruLine from NPR. Thanks for the show. Thank you. line to find out more. Big thanks to everyone who has already joined. Enjoy.

Part 2. 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 with into a relationship with. Maybe there's something holding me back from saying I want to 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. 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 know, 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? 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 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? 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 in. We were learning about relationships. We were trying to figure out what does it look like? Right. And so we see this and it's like, well, I'm learning about love. This must be what it is. Knowing if I watch to learn and knowing that ideals exist and knowing that in over 90% 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 like 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 like 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. 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 Durham, North Carolina, and you're listening to Three Lives in NPR. 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 watching my friends swipe over their shoulders,

and it's super entertaining. But the world is completely foreign to me. I've never set 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 going to 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 a dating app? I want to hear it. The good, the bad, the ugly. Anything you want to say about them, my DMs 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's Emma. I use she, her pronouns. I'm 25 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 her 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. I don't think Hinge had broken in yet. So 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, like 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 noncommittal 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 using the app that kept her going back to it. What was that? There were positive parts. Emma is queer, and so it was a good way for her to come into that identity and explore her sexuality in 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, OK, 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. Like, 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 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 Maura 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 was 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 like traditional, like moral, like, oh, there's like, you know, and I'm using air quotes here, loose women out on the run, like moral like oh just 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 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 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, 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, it stops being cyberspace and increasingly is just interwoven with every single aspect of physical reality in 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 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. Like we could think about how the way that this technology 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, right? Like now you can just meet someone ostensibly outside of any social context like that. So there's something sort of 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, that 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, 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 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 like, the cost and the effort of like getting dressed and going out and meeting someone and risking being rejected, etc, 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 they 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 like what people can do

beyond this depressing, narrow, like 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 have some deal breaker where it's never going to work with that person. But after that first level sorting function, the algorithm

is not very good at figuring out who's going to 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. Obviously, the natural question for me is like what now if 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 her friends and she's like, guys, I think I'm going to 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 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 this sounds 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 Zizek'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. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... 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 Vogel. The episode was mixed by Josh Newell. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Thanks to Johannes Dergi, Kara West, Edith Chapin,

and Colin Campbell. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at doline at npr.org. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Grammarly. Back and forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results.

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