P.S

while having a romantic partner is not a necessity for everyone, having a community is. “I truly believe that hyper-individualism, which is deeply rooted in capitalism, does so much work to trick us into believing that we should feel like we can do everything in life on our own,” maya says, adding that being in a relationship has made them so much... See more

Looking for love sounds more like chasing the high of an extreme sport, trust falling with someone you don’t really know like that. It demands exacting reciprocity, extreme vulnerability. It brings out people’s basest and most primal instincts and a frightening desire to merge into someone else. When the girlies on TikTok talk about dating, they... See more

Increasingly, consumers (Gen Z’s especially) are seemingly ditching Bumble, Hinge, and Tinder in favor of apps that better cater to their preferences and behaviors. In the last 18 months or so, a new paradigm of dating apps has emerged, many of which draw upon growing behaviors around gaming, live and short-form video (Curtn, Lolly, Snack, Filter... See more

Prioritizing pure feeling, so the idea goes, leads to people choosing bad, unsuitable partners, to acts of desperation and violence, to shirking your duties. That love can also be an incredibly redemptive force meshes uneasily with our sense of individualism, with our Protestant ethics. Controlling it requires an entire normative framework.

The problem today’s daters face is that the mass adoption of online dating apps has not only eroded incentives to switch from explore to exploit mode, it has made exploration itself boring and dysfunctional.

these days, the art of hanging out seems to be waning in cities.

The more people who buy a product, the further the product’s message spreads, the more money the company makes, the more they can invest in their projects. It's a virtuous cycle of creation and consumption. By making scale—the number of people who use or see the creation—an explicit part of the art’s statement, they naturally marry the business’s... See more

Falling in love seems to happen mostly either by a process of osmosis or simple familiarity (and a lot of waiting) or by setting intentions of seriousness and weeding out partners who don’t share them. Sometimes, it happens randomly. Sparks fly. You’re reminded why there’s so much poetry, so much music, so many stories, so many cautionary tales... See more