Is technology making dating worse or showing us who we are?

Men have long prioritized ease over connection, it's finally catching up to us.

Danielle Chenette

Recently, the New York Times published an article imploring men to “come back.” We never needed you to be perfect,” the author writes, addressing men who she says have grown emotionally vacant. “We needed you to be with us. Not above. Not muted. Not masked. Just with…We’re not asking for performances. We are asking for presence.”

Like many, I was struck by something undeniably true in the piece. Men are disappearing from social spaces and intimate connections. “A slow vanishing of presence,” is how the writer, Rachel Drucker, describes it. But inherent in this plea for men to “come back” is the call to an earlier time when men cared about presence and connection.

“There was a time, not so long ago,” she writes, “when even a one-night stand might end with tangled limbs and a shared breakfast.” Like the author, I’m old enough to remember mornings-after filled with fried eggs and the hope for more. But those moments were, more often than not, performed obligations. After the eggs, I mostly never heard from them again. She also notes that men once gained status by showing up with a woman by their side. But that woman always had to fit the shape of traditional beauty standards to achieve that status. It was just a matter of time until she was rendered ever more flatly, an icon that technology could replace.

Reading the piece, I had to wonder whether men have actually changed or if technology has just improved such that they can behave exactly how they’ve always wanted. And now, confronted with their stark preference for emotional avoidance when social pressures and shame are removed, we’re somehow shocked and appalled.

Back when we all met in person, there was some basic level of accountability at play; it behooved us to behave with decency—word might get around. But is the performance of kindness better than the bald disappointment of reality? I’ve never had my heart broken as much as I did between the years of 2005 - 2010, a period that would eventually be deemed the height of “hookup culture.” Facilitated by the rise of cell-phones, we did not “date” back then so much as we met-up. Meet-ups loosely involved texting your romantic interest after dark on your flip phone to agree on a nearby bar while your friends hovered until you were buzzed enough to go home with them. To put any overt effort into the process was immediately deemed lame, though most women I knew (myself included) bent over backwards to seem “chill” and go-with-the-flow.

When OKcupid popularized online dating at the tail end of the aughts, it did not destroy the dating landscape, for many of us it saved it. For the first time in our young lives the idea of a “date” was an actual thing, not just an abstract concept we saw in movies. The introduction of online dating (pre-Tinder) was a kind of social savior when the world of “chill,” drunken hookups was growing unbearable. The formality of crafting long, thoughtful bios and messages (this was all on a desktop, mind you) was a thrill. I remember workshopping these long-form passages with my guy friends who struggled to know what to say, resenting the effort required.

But technology is efficient, its aim is to make things frictionless. Those early days of online dating were a blip. It was just a matter of time before “hookup culture” re-emerged in a new, optimized form, men once again prioritizing ease, always more focused on the photos anyway. Except that, a decade later, women were no longer in the death grip of turn-of-the-century faux feminism, falsely equating sex with power at every turn. If men didn’t want to put in the emotional effort to form a genuine connection, we were—and are—happy to move on.

Men prioritizing ease and women prioritizing connection has long shown up in dating tropes. The “taxi light” theory, popularized decades ago by Sex and the City, continues to strike a chord for a reason. It posits that men enter a committed relationship not when they encounter the strongest spark, but when they’re at a point in their life when they want a partner, then their “light” turns on and they settle down with the closest loosely compatible woman nearby. Men also tend to pair with younger women as they get older, versus women with similar life experiences who (generally) know themselves and their needs better. As I’ve gotten older, I continue to notice the ways in which the women I know will go to great lengths to chase connection, seeking partners who expand their worlds, while men seem to increasingly prioritize ease with age, seeking women who fit neatly into theirs.

The obvious rationale is that women are raised to accommodate. From a young age, we’re taught to be experts at pleasing. We grow up with the notion that something about us needs fixing, whether it’s our bodies, our hair, our clothes. We’re conditioned to be thirsty for guidance and growth, to seek approval on every front — especially from men. And men are generally made to feel as if they need to be the stabilizing force in a heterosexual relationship, that they should have their life in control and not ask for help. But what I’m talking about is not necessarily about accommodation or control, it’s about who prioritizes connection above all else. And why.

As a matter of necessity in our society, women spend much of their lives seeking the approval of men. Some part of us feels the need to be seen and accepted by a man to feel valid. As someone who works in tech especially, much of my professional life has hinged on this acceptance. But women are so rarely seen in the way we want to be — as full, complex people. There is so much we’re encouraged to hide, to apologize for, that when a woman meets someone who understands her layers, who sees her and hears her and appreciates each complicated detail, logistics are a mere afterthought.

I can’t help but think that men’s preference for ease is related to the fact that they do not need to feel seen and understood by a woman in order to validate their existence. They are inherently validated by a patriarchal system. Attention from women may make a man feel more useful and masculine, reinforcing an existing role. But in a broader, intellectual sense — in terms of whose opinions are given weight, whose decisions shape our culture — they don’t need women’s approval to operate successfully in our society; their self-acceptance doesn’t hinge on whether there is a woman who fundamentally gets them.

In fact, if men are truly seen by a woman, they may have to confront weaknesses that society rarely requires them to consider. The mutual understanding some women seek can be the very thing that makes some men want to hide.

Men seeking ease over connection hints at something more fundamental about our inability, as a culture, to admire women. Men truly admiring women, in the sense that there are things about women they want to embody in themselves — to see women, in a sense, as role models — is still notably rare. Men are far less likely to read books by women, consume art by women, or have female heroes posted on their walls as kids. Not to say men aren’t drawn to women they respect. What I’m talking about is the desire to explicitly learn from someone else’s way of life, to not just like them but want to be like them. Inherent in the desire to be like someone else is the willingness to change oneself. And men are not used to introspecting and adjusting in this way—certainly not for women.

Technology changes behavior in so much as it frictionlessly facilitates our most base impulses. But it does not create those impulses. Men continue to be raised to feel as if they should know more than women, be superior to them in some core way. Even if they respect feminine qualities, they still rarely want to learn and inhabit those qualities themselves. And why would they in a culture that consistently devalues women’s work?

This is not to say men don’t learn from their partners over time. Studies show that men get more out of long-term partnership than women. But the growth inherent in the act of sharing a life (and benefiting from a woman’s emotional labor) isn’t what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is something more primal and upfront. A preliminary desire to learn from and expand, not the inevitable, unintentional happening of it.

Social pressures are falling to the wayside on every front—for better and worse. Thankfully, many of us feel less pressure to pursue the heteronormative path of marriage and children. Having a pretty woman as arm candy conveys less status than before—also a win. But why partner with an actual human at all, we may start to wonder, if there’s no social pressure? Connection is the answer. To feel seen and understood by another person—both physically and emotionally— and grow together with all the messiness inherent. As women continue to identify what we want and ask for it, to provide our own validation rather than contort ourselves to get it from men, the potential for connection is genuinely heightened, but the likelihood of ease is drastically lessened.

Technology is getting dangerously good, and it’s showing us who we are. There is a call to men, yes. But it’s much deeper than “come back.” It’s come in. Take the scary, risky step of prioritizing connection over ease. If we continue to let market-driven technology guide the evolution of human relationships, it will always optimize for less friction. But we, as humans, don’t have to. Because, though it’s harder and riskier and takes more time, when it comes to the “why” of it all, that friction is everything.

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Related Recs:

TikTok overwhelms me to an extreme degree but two of my favorite cultural commentators have posts on there about this same piece and dating at large —

Tell the Bees

here and

Miriam Tinberg

here 📱

My friend Sam recently sent me this excellent quote in response to my last essay, and I’m sharing it here because it also relates to this one 🤔

“To say that straight men are heterosexual is only to say that they engage in sex (fucking exclusively with the other sex, i.e., women). All or almost all of that which pertains to love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people whom they admire, respect, adore, revere, honor, whom they imitate, idolize, and form profound attachments to, whom they are willing to teach and from whom they are willing to learn, and whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor, reverence and love they desire… those are, overwhelmingly, other men. In their relations with women, what passes for respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what passes for honor is removal to the pedestal. From women they want devotion, service and sex.” — Marilyn Frye

And of course my novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, is very much about technology, dating, and everything in between 📕