How Can We Make Modern Dating & Relationships Better?
Genes, desire, values, and sexual scripts
Dating in 2024 is a quagmire.
Between the emoji-laden pitfalls of digital communication and the utter collective confusion about etiquette, people regularly hop online to share their nightmares with the world. TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and X are filled with stories of dates gone sour, breakup misery, ghosting stories, and more. And don’t even get me started on the trolls that make dating a minefield of traps laid out for the lulz of unsavory characters across the globe.
Dating has become rigid and impersonal. The spontaneity has died. We’ve become risk-averse to the point of being fun-averse. Everything has been commodified and many people approach relationships like passionless transactions, our prospective partners as objects to be acquired.
One place I’ve watched people struggle over the years is finding a good match. This isn’t unique to 2024. With the cultural transformations that have unfolded in the West over the past two centuries, we’ve shifted from sex, dating, and love being things that were tightly controlled and forced upon us by parents, extended families, the Church, and society at large, to be, these days, a wholly individual enterprise.
The responsibility for our love, or lack thereof, falls squarely in our laps.
Your Erotic Algorithm
Algorithms aren’t just nebulous black boxes of code that run computers. An algorithm is a “set of steps for accomplishing a task or solving a problem.” When you have to clean your kitchen, you probably start with the dishes in case the water splashes onto the counter. Then you clean the counter in case anything falls onto the floor. Then you clean the floor. This is an algorithm. It gets you from point A to point B as instructed.
Algorithms can be efficient or inefficient. When they wanted to predict the future, the Ancient Greeks would have precise religious ceremonies before they’d make an animal sacrifice to the gods. Then, they’d fondle the animals’ entrails in the hopes of divining the future. I wasn’t there, but it’s safe to say, that this algorithm is nowhere near as efficient as the aforementioned algorithm for cleaning your kitchen.
Whether we know it or not, our minds run very complex algorithms that help us decide if someone might be a good match for us. Most people are using the best tools they have to find the best match for them, a highly individualized version of the algorithm the human race evolved with.
The problem? Our algorithms need an update. There’s a mismatch between what we want from modern relationships and the tools we evolved to obtain it. We need to make our algorithms more efficient.
Part of our brain’s algorithmic shuffling of potential mates is beyond our control. Our genes silently nudge us towards some prospective partners and away from others.
Part of our brain’s algorithmic shuffling of potential mates is beyond our control. Our genes silently nudge us towards some prospective partners and away from others. This part of the process is physical, not cerebral. Our bodies and brains effortlessly know who’s a good physical match for us. When we think about sex with someone who interests us, our bodies instantaneously respond with pleasurable sensations. When we think about sex with someone who does not interest us, we effortlessly experience the visceral displeasure of disgust.
We evolved to desire the people our algorithms determine to be the best potential mates for the survival of our offspring. We naturally find these potential partners “hot” and we have a hard time explaining why. It defies logic.
Much of this has to do with our sense of smell which may be one reason why digital dating has gone awry for so many people. You can’t smell someone on the internet.
These uncontrollable, genetic factors that we usually call attraction, chemistry, and romance are great. But they aren’t the whole picture and certainly aren’t enough to pave the way for a lasting, healthy relationship. We need value-based traits to align as well, things like honesty, fairness, selflessness, and more.
Modern love, sex, and dating are about much more than just attraction and making babies. We now view relationships as a source of personal happiness and fulfillment. And we know that happy, healthy, successful relationships require other traits like sacrifice, compromise, compassion, and honesty. These are the parts of your algorithmic mate-picker that are within your control. We can intentionally match with people who share our values, be they monogamy (or non-monogamy), family or freedom, independence or security.
Matching values isn’t as effortless. We have to think about them and we can explain logically them to other people when asked. They involve our sexual scripts, what we’ve come to believe is important in our relationships and how believe the arch of our relationships should play out. The good news is, they’re more malleable.
You can’t control whether or not you feel gut-level attraction for any one person. It’s easy to find someone you’re attracted to—it’s harder to find someone whose values match yours. But you can choose the traits you value in a partner, at least to some degree (much of what we value is genetic), and you can certainly observe people to see if they possess the traits you seek.
We often find people are dead sexy but don’t share our values. Or, the opposite happens. Our values align perfectly, but we find them physically unattractive.
Because of this mismatch, we’ve responded by tying ourselves in knots and doing mental gymnastics to resolve the internal conflict. It feels like we’re being powerfully ripped in two different directions at once, forced to choose between our innate desires and understanding of our well-being. That’s how we get this kind of confusion:
I assure you, chemistry is not a red flag. Chemistry is immensely important. It evolved for good reason. It’s hard to imagine why someone would want to be with a partner they don’t click with. But it’s only part of the recipe for successful relationships.
Resolving Your Internal Conflict
This fundamental conflict—between our evolved processes and modern desires for fulfillment—has led to a slew of bad dating advice proliferating online. Dating coaches, relationship gurus, pick-up artists, red and black pill dudes, and many more have cropped up to try to convince you what you need.
But what if what each of us needed was inside of us all along? What if we could construct our algorithms to get us from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible?
You can. Just update your algorithm to encompass more than just attraction and what society has told you is important in a partner. It’s essential that you decide for yourself what you want in a relationship. Then find someone who makes you feel that gut-level attraction for who also matches the values you want your relationship to embody.
One of the most crucial aspects of your sexuality is your sociosexual orientation. Your sociosexual orientation is your outlook about and inclinations towards various kinds of sex. It encompasses your behaviors and attitudes regarding the extent to which you’re open to short-term, non-exclusive sexual encounters versus long-term, exclusive relationships.
Some people want one partner for life, others want lots of partners.
If you’re looking for something long-term with one person, casual sex will make you miserable. If you’re more of a free spirit who wants to experience love or sex with multiple partners, the constant pressure to conform to monormativity can be annoying and you’ll have to learn to ignore that little voice in the back of your head that constantly tells you to hurry up and find one person.
Ask yourself (and be honest), if are you looking for a short-term or long-term relationship. Do you want lifelong monogamy or short-term sex? Do you want neither or both? Do you want something in between? Why did you pick that and what would you pick if you could choose either short or long-term relationships with the certainty that whatever you picked would succeed and work out exactly as planned? What would you do if anything was possible?
Some people are perfectly okay sleeping around while keeping their eyes peeled for the match they want to stick with. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we’re honest about what we want and what we’re doing. Find other people who are doing the same.
A lot of people sleep around looking for love. And a lot of people settle down looking for sex with multiple people.
The problems come along when there’s a sociosexual mismatch. A lot of people sleep around looking for love. And a lot of people settle down looking for sex with multiple people.
I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to me and said, “Help! My partner is absolutely against an open relationship. Now that we’ve been together a few years, I want an open relationship. How do I convince them to give it a shot?”
These are the kinds of things that should be hashed out beforehand.
You also want to figure out what you expect from your relationship. Are you growth-minded or destiny-minded? In other words, do you think relationships are things that happen to you when you meet the right person, or are they experiences that you construct?
If you’re growth-minded, you believe that there are many potential matches out there and that a healthy, happy relationship is less about finding the perfect match and more about learning the skills to build successful relationships with a wide variety of people.
If you’re destiny-minded, you’ll be more focused on finding “the one” or your twin flame, because relationships shouldn’t need to be patched up.
You also want to make sure you align on values like honesty, empathy, desire to have children (or not), and other things before you decide to establish something long-term. Finding your match necessarily requires finding out who you are.
We’re all looking for something very specific in these regards and it’s easy to get caught up in the flow of innate attraction and forget that we have very specific ideas about how things will work when things go well. So much focus is placed on meeting people in our culture and so little attention is given to sustaining the connections we create.
If you haven’t thought much about this and made up your mind, it’ll be easy to crack under pressure when your hormones rev up into overdrive whenever you’re around someone you find deeply attractive or on those lonely nights when you feel like you’ll never find someone(s) right for you.
But you don’t need to sacrifice your passion, your desire, your attraction, at the altar of safety. We’ve become too risk-averse, afraid of feeling things we can’t control. But if you can’t control your behaviors in the beginning, when relationships are the most effortless, it will be nearly impossible to control them as the relationship progresses.
We can and should find the right partners for us. It’ll require bearing a bit of discomfort in the beginning while we date around. These conversations can be difficult to navigate. But with practice, we can master them.
Finding your match necessarily means finding out who you are. I’ve never read that anywhere else before in that context, but you’re spot on