Critique on Modern Dating
There are many people you will love, and they are not necessarily the same people you will make a life with.
Ask yourself: are you looking for a love story or a life story? There are some things you don’t need in order to have a love story with someone since it lives in an encapsulated world of its own. A life story, on the other hand, is about values, not just about feelings. So when you are looking for the right person, it isn’t about what attracts you, it’s about who you can build a life with.
What values matter then? The most important one: your relationship with others. If you are a person who values relationships, who see the presence of others in your life to be essential, and yet you are with someone who values more autonomy and independence, then there is an issue. How will you create a life living inter-generationally with your whole extended family if they don’t want your parents over?
An important question to ask: were you raised for loyalty or autonomy? For interdependence or self reliance?
Relationships now are more complicated than they were 50 years ago, aka the love our parents have taught us is outdated in the current world. In the past, there were clear unwritten rules. From the moment you were born you were told what you were, where you belonged, and what you were supposed to do. A community looked over you all the time, and everybody knew what was happening in the neighbor’s house (metaphorically). But now, your best friend could be breaking up and you don’t even know it.
Basically, no body knows what the fuck is going on in the neighbor’s house. So you are left wondering, am I the only one going through this? Instead of a tight knotted society, we have loose threads making up a network — with commitments that can be revoked at any minute.
Think about it: there is no fixed loyalty, it all has to be negotiated. Everything that was a rule is now a conversation, which most definitely leaves us with choice overload.
Perhaps settling down — or commitment issues relates to perfectionism since there’s literally no way to know when to stop searching. When do you know if what you have is enough, if the future life you have chosen is the best possible outcome? It blows my mind that people just know who they are going to marry. I literally can’t comprehend that concept.
Maybe it’s a gut feeling, but gut feelings can be blinded by infatuation.
Maybe it’s a weighing of the pros and cons, but logic can be fooled by idealism.
Maybe it’s learned through experience in relationships, but how many times does a heart need to break?
Summarized from Esther Perel.
