The Dehumanization of Dating

Postmodernity takes its toll on all of us, and dating is no outlier.

Truth of the matter is that showing your emotional weaknesses unrestrainedly in the early stages of a relationship is neither wholly encouraged nor conducive to romantic success.

You’re still expected to be a man and to just take shit. Harbouring feelings stemming from a belief of inadequacy, such as envy, internalized anger and shame, is not perceived as attractive.

Society expects these visceral difficulties to be dealt with on one’s own. These feelings are conceived of as your own introspectional issues that you’re projecting onto the world.

Whilst there is some truth to this claim, it tends to overlook the fact that human are humans who simply crave a sphere of relation to soften their hard shell of social conditioning, and the rigid solipsism of our hedonistic era doesn’t help to satisfy this need in the slightest.

When you showcase your genuine emotional weaknesses or an individual tendency to get attached, it’s culturally frowned upon as needy and feeble. As a result, your romantic interest ghosts you in response.

It has come to the point that if someone unintentionally says or does a single thing wrong, something which crosses the other person’s hypersensitive boundaries, that may result in the relationship getting ruined in its crucial formative stages when it hasn’t fully materialized yet, which is utterly unfair for no good reason.

What ought to be advocated for in the dating and pick-up community is to establish an interpersonal space for spontaneous weirdness, human fault and “fucked up-ness”. A measure of our less admirable sides should be tolerated, not shunned.

Personally, I do not have a long dating history, but I’ve also felt the need to consciously restrain myself from expressing the true thoughts and emotions which I’m going through, precisely because they’re not indicative of a perfectly handsome and self-confident guy.

That certainly drains me: indeed, it’s poignantly characteristic of the Freudian conception of repressive civilization.

What we must call for is a rehumanized romantic sphere which sees people for what they are, triumphant in fallibility and in dire need of love and acceptance. Social prejudices and stereotypes about what “type” someone is ultimately put them into the same categorical and limiting preconceptions as a Chad or a Stacy, which operate within a fundamentally dehumanizing superego by virtue of arbitrary social media trends.

However, the other person often may not be interested, since want is obviously not something you choose. Especially in the pick-up community, it’s practically unavoidable to not be “testing the waters” in search of “the one”.

What troubles me is how hook-up culture and the dating sphere have regressed to the point where they explicitly engage in brazen economistic talk of other people in terms of attractiveness, which threatens to reduce romantic seduction and settling down to a perpetual market of cost/benefit analysis, and not a profoundly human affair. Look into sexual economics theory for more insight.

In practice, it’s not organic love which is prized the most, but a cold, heartless and calculating individualist game of “finding the right one for me”.

This egregiously self-interested approach can lead some people to unconsciously agonize other people without a second thought for the sake of personal satisfaction — where is the emphatic relation in all of this?

We can do so much better than to put cynicism, indifference and naked self-interest at the pedestal of our society. When we view the real in light of the ideal, it’s painfully obvious that we can treat people markedly better at little cost to ourselves.

What deeply pains me is to see people not recognize and treat disappointed romantic partners as actual living human beings — they’re just expected to move on in an age without any necessary commitments.

Why not be good to others, as a sincere expression of altruism and compassion? Or have these values been devalued by the impersonal juggernaut of bureaucratic technocracy and the affect-less artificiality of consumerism?

There’s always going to be room for hard truths, and temporarily there is little we can do to change this sociocultural malaise at the heart of our personal lives.

We can only strive to be better than the rejectors, and to perhaps give them a “heads up” about it.

Making people notice unappealing sides of themselves may motivate them to deliberately modify their behaviour, at least for some people; many are too docile, servile to their wants and unconscious to change themselves in any meaningful way.

The early testing and evaluation phase in a relationship is cruel, but you’ve got to have your own life figured out and to not let rejections drag you down (though there certainly comes a point when we just can’t take limitless rejections anymore).

In effect, deprioritize your love interest and start to pursue other aspects of your compartmentalized life, whether it be hobbies, interests, socializing, finance, health and the like.

This will prevent you from becoming obsessive, since it’s partly a factor of not having a life of your own. Don’t let it devolve to a cult of egocentrism and an idealization of busyness: be a person who’s reasonably available, but don’t make the other person out to be into someone they’re not.

Be able to see who they truly are with level-headed eyes; you’ll find that the person is not a human without faults.

Seneca the Younger once stated that “there is more pain in fantasy than in reality”, an rather unheard-of yet timeless aphorism which just rings so true.

Additionally, we can find some deep-sought solace in the self-knowledge that the person whom you’re making them out to be may just be some imaginary ideal constructions which you project onto them to compensate for an emotional deficiency in your own life. Projection is a genuine phenomenon, but it’s not all there is to our layers of emotional complexity.

Only be dispassionate and detached when evaluating mutual (in)compatibility at the beginning of getting to know someone, and try to not take the process too seriously.

To conclude, the human must return to romantic affairs, not as a sex object or a psychological case study, but as a profound and purposeful bearer of social reciprocity where we can be and not have, in the philosophical sense of Gabriel Marcel.

All humans need someone to lean on, and that aspect of our true selves doesn’t have to be harshly and coldly disparaged as “co-dependencies” or various other labels which pop out of the culturalist machine.

In the words of Nietzsche, we are just all too human. We are all humans, too.