this is how not to hate dating

your ex probably isn’t evil, love isn’t a game, and you're probably going to get hurt

‘How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.’

– ‘The More Loving One’ by W. H. Auden

‘You end up being the loyal golden retriever that's getting played... Look at her, she's so smiley, she's so happy. When you become so loyal, so loving, you are transforming your man into a black cat.’ 

– A TikTok by user @annakrstna

Love’s a game, wanna play?

- ‘Blank Space’ by Taylor Swift

It’s a really weird time for love.

I mean, I don’t know if there’s ever been a normal time for love, but don’t things feel specifically bad right now?

In October, everyone seemed to be sending each other Moya Lothian-McClean’s piece for The Londoner on why dating sucks so bad. Christmas lights went up at the beginning of November, coinciding, for me, with a fresh, new heartbreak. And disillusionment isn’t just the flavour of the month. A lot of young women in particular are unpacking just how much weight they’ve been taught to put into being chosen by men – the “boysober” trend on TikTok, South Korea’s 4B movement, a general growing emphasis in mental health culture on focusing on yourself and on nurturing and prioritising platonic relationships. 

But I also think that there’s something in the air which goes beyond heterosexual dynamics, single people, or election results – an attitude which increasingly defines how we relate to each other. In my last post, I talked about envy-mining – the way we’ve decided, as a culture, that the best thing you can do is make other people feel bad about themselves in relation to you. Our language and discourse around dating has taken on a similar tone.

From beginning to end, there is a hostility in the way we see each other, a by-product of all that envy we’ve been mining. Someone doesn’t want to be with you? They must be an idiot. You have a crush on someone? Leave their texts unanswered for a few days so they don’t get the upper hand. They changed their mind? They intentionally manipulated and lovebombed you. You want to ask someone out? Don’t – they’ll see this as a surrender, so wait for them to surrender first. 

When was the last time you thought of dating as something pleasurable?

Carrie Bradshaw, Sex & The City

People have a tendency to blame dating apps for everything, but I think so much of what we’re experiencing isn’t really new – anger and despondence are natural responses to the reality that if you want to find love, you are probably going to get hurt. And the thing is, you’re going to get hurt a lot! A whole bunch of times! And this is your destiny regardless of whether or not you’re in a stable, loving relationship which lasts the whole of your life – because no amount of love, communication, thoughtful anniversary presents, romantic holidays, engagement rings, or new furniture will ever be enough to stop the two of you from being human beings. 

I’m not talking about abusive situations – I’m talking about the acute, aching mundanity of having your heart broken by someone who isn’t evil, who doesn’t have an agenda, who was maybe selfish or unkind or dishonest but was, realistically, not plotting against you. There was this TikTok trend back in summer, when girls posted themselves texting their exes a Spotify link to Taylor Swift’s ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’. The song’s bridge asks a series of questions of an ex-lover: “Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? / Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? / Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? / In fifty years, will all this be declassified?”. It’s a very cathartic song to scream when you’re going through a break-up, as I did this summer at the Eras Tour, but I don’t think the song is meant to be taken literally. I’m not sure what pathologizing our exes as evil people really achieves – beyond giving the hopeless messiness of love some kind of structure, a kind of exoskeleton of meaning. That’s one function of art in our lives, and there are so many books and songs and paintings which have got me through my own heartbreaks, but even Taylor took the time to remind people, back in June, that art is art and life is life. Which is all to say: it’s fine, it’s even good, to be angry, but you can’t let anger define your story forever. 

Whether your heart is smashed open or it’s just a hairline fracture, love is, and has always been, painful. One response to this is to look for a way to never get hurt again, a desire which has successfully funnelled money into the dating advice industry ever since its conception. With the advent of algorithms, influencers, and monetisation, that industry has found its new and improved home on the internet, particularly via TikTok, where creators like Simona Catalano give advice like: “In dating, you will need to learn to play the game.” Catalano’s advice rings like cliché, but her videos have been liked 18 million times: “Men don’t want to be chased,” she says. “If he wanted to, he would,” she says. “They like a challenge.”

She’s talking about the four-dimensional chess you’re meant to play when you (girl) like someone (boy). A winner plays moves like: not texting back too fast, not asking him out first, not being too available. A loser throws the game by: being too needy, planning dates, asking for what she needs. If you just listened to dating coaches on the internet, you would be forgiven for thinking that…

Love is something you win, not something you feel

The Judgement of Paris by Angelica Kauffman (1781)

Again, there is nothing new about these ideas. Straight women in the 1990s were reading The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, which included the advice to never “be open or vulnerable,” and “to keep your feelings of love or hurt inside”. We’ve just created new, memeable formats to say the same things over and over – like, for example, the idea of “black cats” and “golden retrievers”. The retriever chases, the cat is chased – the goal is to be the cat. “In every relationship there is the adorer and the adored,” another dating creator says, “Which one do you want to be?” John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing that capitalism sells the idea that “those who have the power, become lovable.” TikTok creators tell you to treat love as a game, but really what they’re asking you to do is to treat it like a hostile takeover.

This worldview is premised on the idea that to be vulnerable is to be unlovable. In this transaction, the best thing – the most lovable thing – you can be is untouchable. This is often presented as a heterosexual dynamic, but no one is really immune to the fear of being a loser. 

There is a distinct lack of pleasure in seeing love this way.

Meme, anonymous

What’s the point of being adored from afar? Why is that the prize? “Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance,” Berger writes. W. H. Auden, in the poem I’ve quoted above, agreed: dramatising the relationship between the earth and the heavens, he decides that it’s better to be down here, admiring “stars that do not give a damn,” than it would if the positions were reversed. What do you really get out of someone burning for you with a passion you can’t return? Sure, you might never get hurt, but you also won’t ever get to feel anything except, maybe, a very lonely ego boost. 

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to want to be desired. To flirt, to be admired, to be wanted – I think these are all pleasures in their own right. But envy is different from desire. And it’s all connected – the way we see dating as a game to be played, the bad deal we made when we swapped ‘love affair’ for ‘situationship’, how we slap pop-therapy labels on people’s mistakes as if we’ve never made any of our own. You see this reflected, too, in our online performances. The most important thing you can be is hotter than your partner’s ex. The best revenge is a glow-up. We curate a perfect image on Instagram Stories so they’ll come crawling back – so we can reject them again.

I just don’t think I want to live like this: seeing lovers as opponents, prioritising my desirability over my own desires, reducing the impossible complexity of feeling to a set of rules or memes, believing in revenge plots. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do your best to protect your heart and learn from your mistakes, but there has to be a middle-ground between suspicion and naïvety. And can I also just say: this is supposed to be FUN! Not all the time, obviously, but if you’re going into love with a battle strategy, you are simply going to have a bad time. 

People don’t fall in love with you because they are jealous of you or in awe of you or because they’ve lost to you; they fall in love with you because they look at you and recognise something more complicated and more difficult and more special than the mask you put on. Yes, you are probably going to get hurt, or embarrassed, or rejected, or misunderstood. But each time that happens, you are also going to find kindness, compassion, and perspective.

Love isn’t a game to be won, but if it was, loss would not be the same thing as losing. Heartbreak is the worst thing that has ever happened to you until, suddenly, ten months have passed and you’ve learned something, you’ve gained something.  There is so much pleasure to be found in vulnerability, even though it’s hard and scary and weird. Your own capacity for love has depths you have not yet plumbed: don’t make up limits that don’t exist.