Discourse Against Dating

Explaining the negativity bias in dating discourse takes us deep into enemy territory.

We’ve concluded the first chapter of our journey, Not like other books. It had two goals: to set expectations for Second Person readers, and to cure you of the yearning for some expert authority to manage your dating for you.

“Science-based dating advice” won’t change your romantic life, but it does little harm. You get validation that your problems are perfectly normal, that they are the concern of important experts, and that you will ultimately be OK. The important expert gets a small royalty and a gig at the next dating app startup. Even if they can’t really tell you how to find your own special someone, you at least feel that they’re rooting for you.

Online dating discourse, however, is very much not rooting for your dating success.

The discourse says you’re marginalized/incel/cat lady and will never get a date because of queerphobia/hypergamy/Hollywood beauty standards. If you somehow land one, it will disappoint because of hookup culture/consent violation/ghosting. If the date turns into a relationship, it will be problematic because of fetishization/age gaps/commitment phobia. If, by some miracle, you get married, you’re just perpetuating gender stereotypes/emotional labor/financial exploitation. Instead of looking for relationships, we should talk about the loneliness crisis/gender polarization/fertility crisis that is caused by people not looking for relationships.

95% of online dating discourse consists of:

1. Taking shots at dating

2. Standing around the chalk outline of dating’s bullet-riddled body searching for culprits

(The other 5% are “one true solution” aesthetic subcultures like cottage core trads, intentional dating optimizers, relationship anarchists, or PUA.)

Dating advice paperbacks are inevitably optimistic about the reader’s dating prospects. Dating discourse is overwhelmingly pessimistic. There are many reasons for this negativity bias; here are the ones I think are important.

Drama

Scandals and divorces are more newsworthy than another happy year of marriage. Conflict and controversy make for engaging stories.

We consume “relationship content” from sources all over the spectrum that ranges from mainstream news to tabloids, personal anecdotes, “real-life inspired”, and pure fiction. These share the same tropes whether they’re completely true or entirely invented. When people talk about their own dating stories, hopes, and fears, they can’t avoid adopting the tropes of dating content, and the main trope is conflict.

Misery Loves Company

Leo Tolstoy said that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Not that he would know: Tolstoy didn’t seem to be acquainted with many happy families, and his own marriage to Sophia Behrs was famously bitter and tumultuous. Sophia’s diaries have been read by thousands of women who identified themselves with her experiences of insecurity, resentment, infidelity, anger, and entrapment.

I wouldn’t imply that the exact opposite of Tolstoy’s maxim is true, but perhaps a more modest version: all relationship problems are shared by others, but every solution is unique.

Complaining about relationships invites people to sympathize, to validate, to share how the same thing happened to them and how they feel the same way. And the opposite of complaining is… bragging. Talking about how you overcame some dating challenge to end up in a happy place will alienate readers who are too many steps removed from that solution seeming possible.

Toxoplasma

A claim goes viral fastest not when everyone agrees with it, and not when everyone disagrees with it, but when exactly half of everyone is in each camp and calling the other half terrible people. This starts a meme cycle when the claim is being shared by everyone: by half the people in violent agreement, half in violent disagreement.

There’s an easy way to generate a scissor story about relationships. Simply describe something going wrong in a romantic context that could be blamed on one of two sides: the man, or the woman. Then, go viral as men and women argue endlessly over who’s wrong.

Pretty much every mega-viral story follows this exact template: the woman who told her BF she wouldn’t see him as a hookup, the guy no longer walking a friend home after she rejected him, every “my bf/my gf” post on r/AmItheAsshole, every tweet by a “posting Ls“ account, and every single story that contains the words “ick”, “consent”, “friend zone”, or “body count”.

These stories are myths, often highlighting some important truth in a way that can generate real insight. But that insight will always be drowned out by the raging blame war.

Sham Positivity

People don’t like negativity. We’re all tired of it. You’d expect a positive discourse to flourish as everyone seeks a break from cynicism. Where is it?

The greatest trick the discourse ever pulled was convincing the world that sex positivity exists:

Conservatives are sex negative. They talk about sex as dangerous and corrupting, to be repressed and regulated for the sake of social order and “family values.” […]

Progressives are sex negative. They support displays of sexuality but often place the act itself under suspicion of harassment, grooming, exploitation… in a progressive utopia everyone flaunts their sexuality as an identity marker, but no one goes so far as to actually flirt or sleep with anyone. […]

Red-pilled men are sex negative. They frame sex not as a positive experience itself, but primarily as a way to keep score in the competitive hierarchy of men. […]

Corporate culture is sex negative. The ideal worker has been scared out of flirting with anyone at work, and stays in the office too late to flirt with anyone outside it.

The education system is sex negative, especially when it engages in “sex education.”

Capitalism knows that sex sells, but it’s not selling you on sex. You’re sold sex appeal—the trappings that make you see yourself as worthy of sex […]

Wikipedia defines sex-positivity as “an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable”… the problem is that positive sex doesn’t result from merely “having an attitude” that it is so. […]

Today cultures pretend to be sex-positive, merely because they are sexually permissive. But it turns out that lack of permission was never the main impediment. Boundaries can be a guide as often as an obstacle, and a guard rail against sex that isn’t “healthy and pleasurable” regardless of attitude. But in a sexually indulgent culture failure to indulge places the blame on the individual, absolving society.

I presented these four explanations — drama, relatability, virality, predatory mimicry— in descending order of how frequently they’re discussed in the discourse itself. Not coincidentally, it’s also an increasing order of treating the discourse itself as the agent. It’s individual people who craft a dramatic or relatable story, but the discourse itself that infects, grows, camouflages — a creature arising from the collective mind. We can make sense of this creature, this egregore, by attributing to it goals and drives that aren’t shared by the individual minds it lives in.

What if we pushed this analogy a bit further? This isn’t a new idea, but it’s one that’s noticeably absent from the discourse.