One of the greatest lessons adulthood has taught me is that there are certain areas of life in which one may privately wish to remain idealistic, yet must learn to operate with a degree of pragmatism. That does not mean abandoning ideals. It means refusing to let ideals turn into self-destruction. The wiser stance, perhaps, is to preserve one’s capacity for wonder while approaching reality with clear eyes: if idealism happens to survive in a given domain, then that is a blessing. If it does not, then at least one does not squander endless time, energy, and emotional life chasing what the structure of the world no longer seems designed to sustain. Among the many domains in which this tension appears, dating is surely one of the most important.
One of the stranger things I have observed is that the most materialistic people are often the most ashamed of their own materialism. They sense, at some level, that it appears spiritually unflattering, so they hide it behind euphemism, sentimentality, or moral decoration. But I do not think there is much value in pretending otherwise. There is no intellectual honesty in covering the architecture of desire with poetic curtains. In fact, that is precisely why I wanted to write this piece from a largely materialist framework. Not because romance is reducible to material forces alone, but because if one wishes to understand why modern dating feels so disorienting, one must first be willing to examine its mechanics without flinching.
If one looks carefully, there is something deeply perplexing about the modern condition. Technology has made so many aspects of life radically easier. Travel is faster. Information is instantly accessible. Communication stretches across continents in a moment. Physical labor has been reduced by machinery. Knowledge that once took months to gather now takes seconds. Yet amid all this acceleration and convenience, dating has not become easier. If anything, it has become more unstable, more exhausting, more disenchanted, and in many cases more emotionally expensive. The question, then, is why.
I do not think the answer lies simply in the claim that human beings have become morally worse or personally less lovable. That is too superficial. The more convincing explanation lies deeper, somewhere near the tension between the mating model that shaped us over evolutionary time and the social-technological environment that has now overturned that model almost completely. In other words, the problem is not merely that people changed. The problem is that the conditions under which human pair-bonding once made intuitive sense have been shattered far more quickly than human nature itself can adapt.
For most of human history, mate selection took place within bounded communities. One lived in a village, a tribe, a town, or some limited social world. The pool of possible partners was narrow, concrete, and visible. Perhaps there were ten people one might realistically consider, perhaps twenty, perhaps a little more. But still, the universe of choice was finite. A person chose not from infinity, but from a circumscribed field of actual human beings encountered repeatedly in real life. Selection therefore required evaluation, compromise, patience, and acceptance of limits. One did not imagine an abstract perfect partner floating somewhere in the distance. One chose among real and proximate possibilities.
Today, for many people, that pool is no longer bounded in any meaningful sense. It can be an entire city, an entire country, or effectively the whole digitally mediated world. The old village has been replaced by the endless scroll. The dating pool is no longer a pool at all, but something closer to an ocean with no shoreline. And with this comes unlimited recommendation, unlimited access to curated self-presentation, unlimited exposure to supposedly better alternatives, unlimited grounds for comparison, and unlimited temptation to defer commitment for the sake of hypothetical improvement.
If anything, evolution seems to have equipped us for bounded selection, not infinite optimization. We are creatures whose instincts were formed under conditions of scarcity, locality, and repetition. But modern romantic life increasingly operates through unbounded selection, and I suspect our psychology was never built to bear this weight. Our genes, one might say metaphorically, are exhausted by an environment of endless optionality. They were written for a world of human limits, yet we now force them to function inside a system that behaves like a marketplace without walls. That, to me, is why dating often feels not merely difficult, but structurally broken. The pace of technological transformation has far exceeded the pace at which our emotional architecture can evolve to meet it. The result is not just confusion, but something like romantic destabilization: a collapse in the model itself.
This helps explain another phenomenon that has been widely recognized in psychology and economics alike: the paradox of choice. The more options people possess, the less satisfied they often become with whatever they choose. More choice does not necessarily produce more freedom in any meaningful sense. Quite often, it produces paralysis, second-guessing, and chronic dissatisfaction. In more primitive societies governed by proximity, people faced fewer options and therefore lower emotional and cognitive costs. Pairing was more stable because the environment itself imposed limits. Relationships were not necessarily more beautiful, but they were often more legible. Expectations were narrower. Comparison was weaker. The margins of error were smaller. Real-life interaction carried greater weight than fantasy, projection, or image management.
By contrast, modern dating is saturated with excess. Excess options, excess comparisons, excess visibility, excess fantasy, excess filtering, excess self-consciousness. One is no longer merely meeting a person; one is meeting them against the background noise of every other person one has seen, imagined, or been algorithmically shown. And that is a profound psychological burden. Human beings are not only choosing partners now. They are choosing while haunted by the permanent awareness of alternatives.
If one steps back even further, one must also admit another uncomfortable truth: the dating model has long operated upon a basic asymmetry recognized in evolutionary theory. Broadly speaking, males tend toward competition, and females tend toward selection. Of course reality is more nuanced than any crude binary, but the underlying logic of sexual selection remains powerful. Selection, even when subtle, occurs in nearly every sphere of interpersonal life. Technology has intensified this process in at least three obvious ways.
First, top-tier male competitors are now visible to an unprecedented number of women. In a pre-modern environment, the strongest, smartest, most charismatic, or best-looking man in one’s village would only be visible to a very limited female population. Today, a desirable man can be seen by millions within hours through video, social media, and digital culture. This radically expands the perceptual range of comparison. A man no longer competes merely with those in his social orbit, but with idealized global exemplars.
Second, women, consciously or unconsciously, may begin to form higher or more composite standards for selection. This is not simply because they become “pickier” in a moralistic sense, but because the imagination itself is being trained by relentless exposure to highly curated models. The traits of top-tier men across different categories can now be assembled into a composite fantasy of the ideal partner: this one’s face, that one’s status, another one’s physique, another one’s eloquence, another one’s humor, another one’s emotional intelligence. The mind builds an impossible synthesis, and ordinary men are then judged against a standard no actual man was meant to embody in total.
Third, men gradually realize that the field of competition has transformed. They are no longer competing with the men in their immediate locality, but with the most exceptional visible men from around the world, including many whom the women around them will never actually meet. This changes male psychology as well. It generates insecurity, performance pressure, resentment, overcompensation, or withdrawal. Even when these elite competitors are not physically present, the informational presence alone is enough to distort the game. The process of selection is no longer governed only by actual proximity, but by mediated imagination.
From here, one can begin to see why many feel that something essential has been lost in modern dating. To me, love has historically endured not only because of emotion, but because it was protected by certain rational conditions: exclusivity, rarity, uncertainty, and emotional reciprocity. These conditions gave romantic attachment its gravity.
Exclusivity mattered because one could not endlessly browse alternatives without cost. Rarity mattered because a person felt singular, not infinitely substitutable. Uncertainty mattered because desire intensifies when outcomes are not mechanically optimized in advance. Emotional reciprocity mattered because attachment became meaningful when it was built through mutual investment rather than opportunistic reversibility.
But under conditions of digital excess, each of these pillars begins to erode. Exclusivity is weakened because the system constantly whispers that there may be someone better just one swipe, one message, one recommendation away. Rarity disappears because statistical abundance turns everyone into a replaceable unit in a massive field of alternatives. Uncertainty becomes corrupted, no longer the mystery of genuine human becoming, but the instability produced by endless options and shallow commitments. Emotional reciprocity becomes fragile because it is difficult to invest deeply in someone when both parties inhabit an environment that structurally rewards keeping one foot out the door.
From the perspective of cold rationality, the incentives become disturbing. If one were a purely optimizing creature, the “best” strategy might be to delay commitment, preserve flexibility, and continue searching for an upgrade. Technology does not merely permit this logic. It normalizes it. One may even participate in it unintentionally, because one’s expectations are constantly being reset by fresh images, stories, and examples every single day. A person sees another couple, another face, another life, another possibility, and begins to ask: what am I doing here? Why settle? Why stop? Why commit when the market appears infinite?
Yet that is precisely the tragedy. A life governed entirely by optimization eventually loses the capacity for devotion. At some point, the search for the better destroys one’s ability to recognize the good. And when that happens, it is not merely relationships that collapse, but the very conditions under which love can become meaningful. For love does not emerge out of endless optionality. It emerges when a person freely chooses to end the search and bear the cost of depth.
So I leave the solution open, not because I believe the problem is unimportant, but because I am no longer sure there is a clean solution available within the structure we have built. Perhaps there is none. Perhaps modern dating is one of those rare domains in which civilization has advanced in power while regressing in wisdom. We have built tools that expand access, but in doing so we may have quietly destroyed the very emotional ecology within which attachment once had the chance to mature.
RJWANG19 
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