Modern Intimacy & Culture
Why relationships in 2026 are judged by feelings, not by compatibility
We Spend 70% of Our Happiness on Relationships and 0% of Our Schooling
From Dynastic Marriages to Romanticism
It used to be the case that when people found partners, they would do so according to fairly pragmatic considerations. In most nations and most parts of the world, for most of history, couples were formed not by the individuals themselves but by the wider society: families, the village, and the court.
There were, if you like, dynastic marriages. You would get together with somebody because they had a plow and you had an ox and it seemed like a good match, or because you were the Duke of Brabant and they were the Princess of Naples and that was seen as a wonderful union.
You got together for reasons that had nothing to do with emotional compatibility. There were a lot of tears, there was sadness, and there was loneliness, but it didn’t seem to matter, because relationships were seen to be about something else.
Then there was a momentous change towards the end of the 18th century, starting in Britain, France, Germany, and parts of Italy: a revolution in feeling that we now know as romanticism. One of its central tenets is that each individual should be left to decide on their partner by the movements of their own heart. It’s a beautiful idea and a very liberating one.
We have now been in the romantic age for around 200 years, and let’s put it plainly: it has been a disaster. We are not any appreciably happier in a romantic culture than we were in a dynastic one.
Why Has It Failed?
Because we have failed collectively to focus with enough intent on the difficulties that couples will have when they choose each other according to the movements of their own heart. We live in a romantic culture that sees something adverse in planning, thinking, and reflecting too hard on the business of love. It has been a serious problem for humanity.
Love Is Complicated
We know in theory that love matters a lot. It is in every pop song, and it is the center of most religions. But we sometimes lose sight of what the word actually means. It is really about connection, and it is one of the most beautiful and most complicated of all phenomena. Even though we have been on this planet a long time trying to figure things out, we are still, collectively, at the dawn of making sense of what we call love. It is no surprise that most people go to their deathbeds thinking, “Not sure I’ve figured that side of life out.”
There are many forms of love. We can love our children, animals, ideas, tables, chairs, clouds, and all sorts of things. But when people sing about love and cry about love, it tends to be the love of one very special person we call our soulmate or our partner.
The Worship of Instinct
A key prejudice of the romantic worldview is that if love is working well, it should follow instinct. There has been an enormous veneration, almost a worship, of instinct. Love is described as a special feeling, not a set of ideas or rationally observable principles. You either have the feeling or you don’t, and you must be guided by it.
There is even a prejudice against language: true lovers shouldn’t talk too much; they should just feel the fluttering of their own hearts. That is why music has such prestige, higher than philosophy. When we are in love, we don’t want to read philosophical tracts; we want to hear love songs.
Emotion should guide us, not reason. In the romantic worldview, reason is the enemy of a truly happy relationship. It is cold, calculating, and unromantic.
What Is Truly Unromantic?
So many things are considered unromantic, and every time something seems unromantic, I would love our readers to question it.
Is it truly unromantic if we define romanticism as the pursuit of a workable relationship?
Is it unromantic to think long and hard about childhood patterns of psychological development?
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Is it anti-romantic to spend a lot of time thinking about families, friends, and compatibility?
All of these things, in my view, belong to a truly adequate way of surveying whether a couple should be together. But nowadays they are considered very unromantic.
To live in a romantic culture means to hold a set of ideas about how good couples should form. They should be formed by instinct. Everybody has a soulmate, and you will recognize yours by a special fluttering feeling that you shouldn’t be asked to account for.
You should simply go for it and marry in Vegas in two weeks if that is what seizes you. You should be able to communicate deeply with your partner without using language, through that special medium of the heart, through silence.
You also shouldn’t criticize your partner. True partners should love each other for who they really are, which means no desire to grow or change. You just accept someone. Couples in a romantic culture will complain, “You’re trying to change me,” and this is seen as really offensive. You tell your friends, “My partner is trying to change me,” and they answer, “What an awful person. You must get out immediately.”
What the Ancient Greeks Knew
If you went to Athens in 400 BC and asked an ancient Greek, “What is love, and where is the role of criticism?” they would say that love is a process of education, the education of emotion.
Lovers should of course be able to pick each other up on things they don’t spot in themselves, and they should be trying to develop into the best version of themselves rather than staying stuck in admiration for who they are today.
The whole process should be dynamic: become who you could be, not worship who you happen to be right now. All of this sounds very strange in romantic culture, which is why relationships are so difficult in our time.
We Leave It to Chance
A person’s life satisfaction is determined by up to around 70% by the quality of their personal relationships. A Martian hearing that statistic and visiting planet Earth would think that Earthlings, given the enormous role of love, must spend 70% of their money and 70% of their educational time working out how this business of love works. Is that true? No. We spend hardly any time thinking rationally about it. None of us are made to sit through classes in attachment theory, apology, listening, or communication.
Physics is important, and geography is important, don’t get me wrong. But is there no time for this, given its role in our lives? Do we really want to leave it to chance? The answer, apparently, is yes, because we live in a romantic culture that sees something adverse in planning, thinking, and reflecting too hard on the business of love. It is very deleterious.
How Art Misleads Us
One of the most powerful disseminators of romantic culture is art, by which I mean all the leading artistic media. If you were learning about love from films, you would be very confused, and that is why many of us are.
Films, television shows, and other narrative forms are hugely misleading. They simply do not show what a real relationship is like. You can probably count on one hand the number of films that have accurately shown love.
One of the most accurate is Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, which ended with Before Midnight, a wonderful reckoning with the real complexities of love. But most films are blithe and superficial and not modest enough in showing us what is really going on between couples.
Music also gives us little miniature stories about how love works. The music is terrific, but it is not accurate to what is going on, and it presses the wrong buttons.
As for poetry, nobody really reads it nowadays, but if they did, the problem exists there too. We have so much media around, and yet we are still strangers to ourselves.
I would say that the single greatest, most misleading disseminator of ideas on love is culture and art. The problem is very heavily located there.
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