The greed in today's love

“What can you bring to my life?”

I’m thinking about love again, and I’m worried about how warped my perspectives on romantic love have become. Online dating is self-involved: “What can you bring to me?” But love asks “What can I give?”

“Without love, our earth is a tomb”

I’ve been single for over a year, after a weighty two-year relationship that stretched my idea of who I was and what it meant to love someone well.

Since that relationship ended, I’ve spent a lot of time questioning who a perfect partner might be. It’s tiring, and the question is fed by a greedy dating culture: You can find exactly who you like, there are thousands of options, and you don’t need to tolerate a bad fit.

I’ve found myself thinking of partners in terms of what I can take. There’s an unusual greed there, and I think differently in other relationships. When I behave transactionally with friends or family, life’s grey. Pouring more love into people makes life sing. I’m focused on the texture of the relationships, not what my people bring to the table. Online dating makes finding a new relationship easy, but a tallying mentality makes deepening them difficult.

“me first” culture pushes standards higher

Before walking into my last relationship the expectations I had were shocking.

I didn’t have space for conflict that wasn’t neat and productive. I wanted a mind reader, trusted confidant, and cheerleader. Someone with it all figured out. I’d be hyper aware of the silliest incompatibilities: Moments we couldn’t settle on a film or agree on how to spend an afternoon.

Social media encourages constantly raising the bar. One perspective suggests looking for someone you can spend the average Wednesday with. Another insists you imagine whether they would make a good co-parent. Would you like your child to date someone like this? And the worst offender of all: “Find your best friend and marry them.” It’s seductive because have-it-all culture doesn’t have limits. It says you can have your cake and eat it too. There are gritty, dark-red insecurities in romance. Friendships never see these sides of us. I’d move mountains for my friends, but I’d run a mile before marrying them. The best friend meme prays one person can handle all of our needs - a lie that ends in resentment.

High expectations are an issue when differences crop up. Dating has started to feel like a lonely carousel: Meet someone, discover a ‘disastrous’ flaw, jump ship.

Finding someone who gives you butterflies is easy. But the fact is that you will change and your partner will change. Guessing at a person who will be right for you today - or in twenty years - is like pinning jelly to a wall. Can you be right for someone else? The test of compatibility is navigating differences, not the measure of butterflies.

love gives, self-obsession possesses

Love is in the giving, not receiving. Bell hooks defines love as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing another’s spiritual growth. I don’t believe there’s special love we reserve for our friends, family, or romantic partners (just that we apportion affection, recognition, respect, commitment and trust differently).

“Without love, our earth is a tomb” - Robert Browning

Online dating reversed the love equation into ‘What can they do for me?’ and fed an ambitious, selfish approach to love. Lasting relationships can’t grow next to this ambition. When are the standards too high? When can we tell our egos enough? There’s a little death in that question, when we close the door on better lives and better relationships. That’s the sacrifice. Quietening the online-dating-voice of what else is out there?

loving well is metamorphosis. the challenge of it is sacred

Loving well is the hardest thing I try to do. Sacrifices I’ve made out of love mark times I matured and grew the most as a man. My deepest regrets are failures of compassion. Rilke puts it best:

“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation…” - Letters to a Young Poet

The transformative voodoo of loving someone can only happen if we stick around and lean into the complexity of it. We touch stars when we show true love to each other in moments of need. Bailing when things have friction cheats us on our most human experiences.

Love is woodwork. Love is a practice. The kinks and friction are part of the enterprise, not signs to give up and let go. Everything meaningful is earned, none of it is handed to us. There’s no story in the things we get for free. Earn the perfect relationship with restraint and patience. Yield to sacrifice and marvel at the beauty in your rearview mirror.

Mourn the death of your ideal partners. They never really existed.