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Romantic Consumerism is Killing Modern Relationships
How the Internet changed the way we love and relate.
In the past twenty-five-odd years, a profound change has taken place in the way we think about and find love. The Internet has completely transformed the landscape from the one that I, a Generation-Xer, encountered when I first began dating as a young adult. Just to take one example, in the early nineties sexual exclusivity was generally assumed, even in the early stages of dating, unless one explicitly agreed otherwise. Today the default assumption between new lovers is the opposite. One does not assume exclusivity until that step is mutually agreed on. This is a significant shift in social mores that has occurred, largely unremarked, since the Internet became the primary arena for seeking romantic and sexual partners. It is a change that reflects a general move towards less committed relationships, and a dating world that is far more complex and ambiguous than it was two to three decades ago.
From 2013 to 2020, I was a facilitator at The School Of Life in Melbourne, running a range of classes largely focused on relationships: how to find them, make them work, move on from them, and live with one’s own company in the intervening periods. For much of that period I was myself on the internet dating treadmill: the default mode for single people in the West. I lurched from date to date, in and out of sundry short-term liaisons, in various stages of hope or broken-heartedness — when I was not myself regretfully inflicting the broken heart on others. I saw the same pattern playing itself out among the people who came to my classes: hope springing eternal in the wounded human breast despite the abundant evidence that something was not working.
So many people now — not only twenty-somethings but people of all ages who are trying to navigate the modern relationship scene — seem to be some combination of bewildered, bruised, numbed and exhausted by the churn of short-lived encounters they find themselves caught up in. Everyone has their war stories, harrowing tales of the breath-taking double-dealing, sleaze, neurosis and just plain emotional incompetence of people they’ve met online. But it’s not just the few “bad apples”, who no doubt have always existed; it seems that a culture of relationship disposability has developed more generally.
