The Best Thing No One Seems to Want

It’s official: modern love is at an all-time low.

It’s not even that there aren’t any eligible fish swimming around, but hardly any fish at all. Many single people I know, mostly women, feel like the dating pool has run all but dry. The word on the street is only reinforced by the latest research: within the past twenty years, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by 30 percent. A good man is hard to find when three out of four men under the age of 30 are staying home playing video games. Consequently, fewer people are taking the plunge. The number of 40-year-olds who have never been married has gone from 6% in 1980 to 25% today (only one-fifth of whom, by the way, are cohabitating). Social norms that we have long taken for granted seem to be changing.

It’s hard to pin down exactly why love is so hard to come by these days, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that we are doing everything we can to avoid the disappointment and heartbreak that often comes with human relationships. If hell is other people, as Sartre said, why not save yourself the trouble by avoiding them entirely?

One result of not spending time with each other is that we are losing touch with the fact that people are generally disappointing. A recent humor piece in The New Yorker which caricatures millennial men and women shows how our standards for finding a love interest have become impossibly high. The man, a silver fox named Josh, “just turned forty, has been on six hundred and seventy first dates in the past three years, and hasn’t found a woman he ‘vibes with.’” Meanwhile, the female version is holding out for “a guy who’s over 6’1″, owns (doesn’t lease) a helicopter, is a progressive pro-choice activist who goes to therapy weekly, and has the physique of a cowboy-lumberjack.” Both characters, of course, have fallen prey to the paradox of choice, the philosophy that the more options you have, the less satisfied you are with the options and the more particular your expectations become. When waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Right, we swipe left on every actual human being.

The flip side of our quickness to judge people online is that we have become increasingly terrified of being judged by others. One reason why young Americans are opting for online interaction is to avoid the risk of heartbreak. A recent study found that 50 percent of Gen Z-ers have decided not to pursue a possible relationship due to the fear of rejection at least once (10 percent higher than millennial respondents). One research participant admitted that he would never approach someone intriguing at a party, preferring to communicate via an app or in the person’s DMs afterward. When putting yourself out there, the risk reward ratio is too high. It’s easier on one’s ego if someone ghosts you online than be told “No,” face to face.

But single people don’t have a monopoly on risk aversion. As a nation, we are taking far less chances. Since the early 1970s, the rate at which people move across state lines has dropped by over 50 percent. One in five married couples are sleeping in separate rooms to avoid sleepless nights. One in four Americans have estranged themselves from a family member in order to stop a cycle of hurt. Why suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that life throws our way when we can avoid them? And yet, we have sadly become victims of our own success. In our attempt to avoid pain and heartache, we have become comfortably numb.

Plato once said, “Human love is the child of poverty.” We all have a hunger for someone to complete whatever is missing in ourselves. As a result, we often treat love like a commodity or a consumer product. When we make relational commitments, be it a friend or romantic interest, we see people as a means to self-fulfillment, as either assets or liabilities. If our own needs aren’t being met, it’s not long before we drop a person from our lives.

But our desire to protect ourselves takes away from the all-or-nothing nature of love. Like Toni Morrison writes in her novel Beloved, “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” When our love for each other inevitably grows thin, it would help to be reminded that love is marked more by self-sacrifice than self-fulfillment. This is why the traditional marriage vows go to the extreme, saying, “With all that I am and all that I have, I honor you.”

Love, by its very nature, is a terrifying ordeal. Loving someone leaves you exposed to rejection, exclusion and injury. The high rewards of love directly correspond to the high risk of being vulnerable with another person. Perhaps C.S. Lewis said it best:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. (The Four Loves, p.138–139)

Maybe Sartre was right, but good luck finding love without people (or heartbreak, for that matter)­. In the end, love is not the experience of getting everything we want but the desire to give everything we have away for the sake of another. It is loosening your grip on your political platform for the sake of family camaraderie. It is forgiving your friend for canceling on you (again!). It is giving generously to someone in need without expecting any repayment. Love always comes at a cost and the cost is always paid up front. Otherwise, it is a favor to be repaid and no love at all.

As the diagnosis of the modern love shortage continues to take shape, the cure seems elusive. And yet, we know that love is incompatible with a zeitgeist of self-actualization. We are drawn toward one another not because we are alike; rather, we become more alike after being drawn toward one another. As Alain de Botton once wrote, “Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.” After all, any love is inconvenient. It comes at the wrong time and with the wrong person. But if there’s one thing Jesus showed us about love, it’s that it’s both costly and the best thing in the world.