Everything We Don't Know About Love

I'm like Dolly Alderton's Scrappy Doo

Feb 20, 2024

As many of my favorite conversations do, today’s began over cheap margaritas. What started with an offhanded comment turned into a multi-hour, multi-bar discussion about love and dating that has continued on and off for the past three months.

Today, I’m joined by Liz Moore to talk about how Disney Channel and One Direction lied to us about what to expect from relationships in our twenties, the evil forces that are afoot on dating apps, and whether or not we believe in life after love.

Liz is a 25-year-old student of life whose current LinkedIn status is, “Figuring it out???” Dating-wise, she’s stuck between mourning the fact that she’s now too old for Leo, grumbling about how this whole modern love scene ain’t what the movies said it’d be, and trying to remind herself that she’s only 25, and to stop overthinking it. She’s probably your token chronically single friend, and she’s fine with that.
Usually, you can find her on a plane, listening to audiobooks on 2x speed, or trying to reach spiritual enlightenment. She got bangs a year ago and no one will shut up about it, and, if she’s not careful, it may go to her head.

Liz sidebar: I just wanted to recognize this is largely showcasing the heterosexual female perspective, and that navigating dating with other identities will obviously look different. I’m not attempting to make any blanket statements about what it’s like for everyone, but rather speak to some of the experiences and perspectives Emily and I have shared.

Emily sidebar: I also asked Liz to ask some of her friends questions about their dating experiences to add more layers to the discussion and keep all of y’all on your toes.

Romance’s Flop Era…?

I have now fallen in love with three different men in my building’s laundry room, all of whom were attractive and charming and flirted with me despite my outfits very clearly reflecting that it was laundry day. However, none of these meet-cutes have developed into a romantic comedy—in fact, none of them have ever actually gone further than the elevator door down into the basement.

Every time I’ve had one of these encounters, I wanted each of them to find their way to my apartment door and confess they hadn’t been able to stop thinking of me and my Halloween t-shirt and orange biker shorts. Sure, I considered doing the same thing myself but I didn’t want to scare them away.1

If I had to be overly honest here on this newsletter I created and solely staff, I grew up on so many stories in which a young girl (who doesn’t know she’s beautiful) gets swept off her feet and falls madly in love with Some Guy, be it with hijinks, mishaps, or sob-inducing drama. It’s a little gag-worthy when spelled out like this, but I know at least one person knows exactly what I’m talking about because she’s today’s guest.

I wanted to kick things off by asking Liz:

Emily: What were your overall takeaways about love, dating, and relationships from media and culture growing up?
Liz: From TV and books, I believed that one day in science class, some gorgeous floppy haired boy would look up at me over his textbook and instantly fall in love. We’d become best friends, kiss on a bridge under the night sky, dance together at prom, and live happily ever after. This never happened, but every year I somehow convinced myself: “This is the year!”
I also got braces late and believed that having braces was the reason no one was falling in love with me. So when senior year, I finally waltzed in with perfect teeth, imagine my disappointment that I wasn’t going to have a Princess Diaries moment. In retrospect, none of the boys in my school were great options, and I’m glad to have avoided adding dating to the other stresses of high school. But I’d say a huge part of my identity growing up was clouded by this confusion—this disconnect between what I believed about how love worked from books, movies, and TV, and what I was experiencing.
From shows like iCarly, H2O, or Hannah Montana, I believed I’d have a guy friend who’d be hopelessly obsessed with me, even though I wasn’t interested, but the fact of his interest in me would prove some sort of worth or validation. From books like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter, I believed I’d form close friendships that would somehow turn into true love without either of us realizing when exactly it had happened. When I reached high school and started binging on Netflix—shows like Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Grey’s Anatomy, and, secretly, Desperate Housewives—I couldn’t understand why everyone in their worlds was dating someone when there were no prospects in mine.
The stories I was consuming made me believe love and relationships would just happen to me—that it was a given. And when nothing magically appeared, I believed it was because something was wrong with me. Especially when my friends and peers started dating, and I thought, why not me? I never considered that it’s more nuanced—some of it is circumstantial, some of it is personal agency. I never considered that I HAD agency. I’m still working through the long-held beliefs I created about my deficiencies.

I have been a longtime fan of and subscriber to Chrissy Rutherford’s incredible newsletter, FWD JOY, and, after reading Liz’s response, I immediately thought of an installment from March 2022. In the piece, Rutherford writes:

Throughout my teens and twenties, long-term committed relationships escaped me. I always felt like maybe I was missing an instruction manual, or I just hadn’t found that missing piece to the puzzle. I think most of us like to believe that dating and relationships are very black and white. If you follow this formula, if you love yourself enough, you’ll be rewarded with the *perfect* relationship. It helps us feel like we have some sort of control in a situation where we don’t have a ton of control, because we’re not the only player involved…But still, I thought, I must be doing something wrong, or there’s something wrong with me because nothing lasted.

Similarly, when Rutherford answered a series of reader questions last August, she was asked by a 28-year-old how to stop worrying about meeting a partner and learn to just enjoy their life in the moment. Her response?

I once saw a post from a celebrity psychic, Thomas John, who I got a reading from years ago that said, “To worry is to meditate on what you don't want.” Of course, worrying is a natural part of life, but that quote has stayed with me. I was also worried throughout my entire twenties that I would end up alone. And guess what? It didn't make that man of my dreams materialize any faster. I had this idea that being 30 and single was a death sentence. Now, I'm 37, still single, and I really love my life.

Realizing that, for most of us, love doesn’t just fall into our laps the way it does in books, movies, and shows is harder to do than maybe we’d care to admit—it’s not even something I’ve fully actualized (here’s hoping Laundry Man #4 is The One). When you’re shown something easily happening for someone else, even if it’s fictional, it’s only natural to wonder what you’re doing wrong if it’s not happening for you, too.

Thinking about this, I asked Liz:

Emily: When did you realize life wasn't like the movies?
Liz: Obviously, I always logically knew (or, let’s say, at least since 7th grade) that life wasn’t like what I read or saw in the media. But as humans, we tend to use external references to gauge what we should be doing in our own lives. While comparison can be harmful, it’s almost instinctual. Because I went to a small private school, TV, movies and books were the main references for what I understood about dating culture in the US.
At some point, I transitioned from the daydreamy state of, “Maybe this year my lab partner will fall in love with me,” to, “Oh my God what is wrong with me everyone has had a boyfriend and I haven’t and time is running out and I’m never going to fall in love and I’m going to die alone.” But then, eventually, I had my first kiss, I got asked out on dates, and things started happening that I had convinced myself would never happen because I was fundamentally flawed.
I had spent years being ashamed when really I just had my own timeline that didn’t match up with that of my most outspoken peers or pop culture. Now, I have a much more healthy outlook, but I still frequently have to make a conscious choice not to listen to the programming in my brain.
Emily: How have you or those around you reacted when their love lives don't look what they've seen on a screen?
Liz: One of the best things I’ve realized in my twenties is that if you can have open and honest conversations with your peers about your insecurities, you discover that you’re not alone in feeling that way. Whether it’s about careers, friendships, or dating, a lot of people feel lost and confused even if they don’t seem like it.
I’ve discovered that a lot of my friends also hold this deep-seated fear that they’re never going to meet anyone and end up alone. It’s comforting because putting that in perspective, knowing we all feel that way, adds an element of humor. There’s just no way we’re all going to die alone. I know it’s going to work out fine.

Of course, none of these are new conversations. I’m sure the girlies in Ye Olde London were walking out of The Globe Theatre, desperately wondering why their beaus were not drinking poison at the thought of losing them like Romeo did. But it all feels so much crueler given the presence of—and I shudder to write this—dating apps.

Liz: You have to love yourself before you can love anyone else: true or false?

Tori: True. I loved myself as best as I could as a teenager but I wasn’t secure in myself like I am now. When I was less confident in what I believed and deserved in love, I found myself infatuated with the idea of someone (more than one) who treated me like an option while I "canceled plans just in case you called."

Liz: Do you use dating apps? What do you think about the way they’ve changed the dating landscape?

Tori: Yes, but I move around so much that I rarely find myself in the pool of cynicism and paradox of choice that dating apps often create. I have met amazing flings through Hinge or Tinder while traveling, but I definitely prefer to meet people in the wild.

Gonna Be a Hard Left Swipe For Me, Dog

For the past two years, there has been an ever-increasing amount of reporting focused on why Gen Z are falling out of love with dating apps. I read through several such pieces during my research for this conversation and while it did strike me as a bit funny that the majority of them seemed to be written by confused Millennials asking for Gen Z to explain themselves, the sentiments of the respondents were all too familiar.

In Kate Lindsay’s Bustle article on this topic from last month, she writes that

on top of the basic swiping system, newer features—theoretically intended to increase connections—have left many users disheartened. Sarah, 29, met her last boyfriend on Hinge in 2018; when she returned to the app three and a half years later following their breakup, things were not the same.
“Most Compatible has become the feature on Hinge I fear the most, because it often makes me question if I am indeed destined to end up with a man whose profile exclusively includes photos of himself in front of sports cars, along with selfies of his ‘best Blue Steel’ facial expression that looks like he just ate a sour gummy bear,” she says. “If this is who the Hinge gods have decided I'm best suited with, I'd rather be single forever.”

Lindsay goes on to share the following opinions about Hinge in particular:

“It feels like they’re hiding all of the good guys who are actually looking for relationships behind a paywall,” says Deja, 25, referencing something Hinge users have come to call “rose jail.”
“Rose jail gatekeeps the hot people on Hinge,” Hannah, 26, says. “Looking at the Standouts section, the men all have jobs, families, and great teeth. The same can’t be said for my regular feed…”2

Lest we forget, dating apps are “actually not all that interested in helping its users find love. ‘Ultimately, the app is more invested in its own revenue than in getting you to marry or have sex—so they’re trying to motivate your engagement,’ Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, told the Evening Standard last year” (X).

Now, in 15 AOD3, not only are users growing more critical of the platforms, but researchers are starting to look into their effectiveness and the longevity of the relationships they produce. However, regardless of complaints and success stories (or lack thereof), dating apps aren’t going anywhere anytime soon which is, in the words of one Martha Stewart, “Good for some. Bad for some.”

I asked Liz:

Emily: Are you on dating apps? Why or why not?
Liz: Currently, I’m on Raya for the meme. It’s just as awful as I had heard, and I refuse to keep paying after my first month is up. Aside from that, I’m not on any. I’ve made brief attempts on Hinge and Bumble a few times in the past, but every time it has felt like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Dating apps just aren’t for me. I’m not built for meeting strangers on the internet. Previously, it caused me intense anxiety; now, it just feels like a waste of time. I’m a busy gal. Why would I give up valuable hours on a first date with a dude I have no idea if I’ll get along with at ALL?
85% of conversations I’ve had on apps are absolutely asinine, and the few that have been funny or mildly interesting still don’t guarantee the guy is worth my time. From my friends who are on the apps, it seems harder these days to find people who actually make the effort to meet up in person. Planning a date on a dating app?!? What a foreign concept!!!
I know people who advocate for the apps say it’s a numbers game and you just have to go on lots of dates and try. But for me, I’d say dating is a lower priority in my life than my friends, hobbies, and work, and I just refuse to compromise and spend valuable time on endless first dates.
Swiping through one dimensional profiles on my phone makes me discouraged. When you meet someone in the wild, you get a sense of their energy and can better determine whether you’re excited to find out more.

Unfortunately, I am almost exclusively an app dater and went so far as to ask for a six-month Raya subscription as a birthday gift this year. It’s not something I’m proud of by any means (both asking for Raya as a gift and being on the apps in general), but using Raya and Hinge is admittedly less vulnerable and physically dangerous than it would be to tell any of my many million subway crushes that I think I’m in love with them.

I’m not alone: according to a piece by Natalie Issa from last fall in Deseret News,

many young adults…just aren’t meeting new people out in the world. Those who have already graduated from college mostly socialize with their friends. And when they do go out among strangers—at bars, parties, etc.—they typically don’t talk to people they don’t know…
For most of Gen Z, dating apps are really the only way to meet new people. As Josi and Quayde Garfield, a married couple who met on Hinge, told me, they would’ve never met if they hadn’t had gotten on Hinge. The same could be said for many of their married or coupled friends that met via dating apps: Their paths wouldn’t have crossed otherwise.

Knowing Liz has an entirely different experience when it comes to online vs offline dating, I wanted to ask:

Emily: What has been your experience dating off the apps?
Liz: I’d say it’s been overall positive! To be transparent, I’m not going on first dates that often, because I’m not meeting straight men that often. But again, dating is not a top priority for me so I am fine with that.
Somewhere along the way, when I accepted that the apps weren’t right for me, I somehow was able to cultivate a more open and approachable energy encouraging potential meeting in the wild. And it has worked! I haven’t met any real winners yet, but over the past few years there have been multiple men whom I’ve dated (some even for a few months) after meeting at bars, through mutual friends, at parties, or while traveling.
Note to any fellas out there: none have been from creepy dudes approaching me on the street. Please stop doing that.

Recently, there was a TikTok that went viral for suggesting that NYC singles try a bar in the West Village called Wilfie & Nell. I was sent—and sent—the original video perhaps three to five times in the days after it was posted, and I think now the reason why the video was circulated so much so quickly was that it seemed to propose a secret to dating successfully: there are places where singles were willing to mingle and build relationships, you just had to find them.

Anyhoo, the fanfare over the bar fizzled out within a week but the whole situation made me curious. I asked Liz:

Emily: Why do you think some people are successful at dating while others like us feel bamboozled by it?
Liz: I believe there are three categories of people who are “successful” daters. (A quick aside to say we’re defining “successful” here as society does, which is that success equals being in a relationship. Yes, it’s problematic and the root of many of the issues we’ve discussed here thus far.)
First, Emily, I hate to say it but I think some people have a je ne sais quoi. Some people never seem to be single for long—any time they have a crush, it’s magically reciprocated and everyone’s happy. How do they do it???
On the other hand, for some people, dating is #1 on the hierarchy of importance in their lives and they’ll work hard at it until they get what they want. And some of those people settle as soon as they have someone interested because they’re just glad to have someone who wants them, to have achieved this goal. I believe this third category is pure luck, which is what I’m hoping for.
But when I find myself playing the comparison game with anyone in one of these categories, I have to check myself against this flawed definition of success. Do I really want that person’s life and relationship? Chances are, no.
Emily: Do you think talking about not having luck or success with dating is still a bit taboo or scary for people? If so, why do you think that?
Liz: Yes because in our society, success and self-worth equals being in a relationship among many other things, I know I’m being reductive and generalizing, but you know what I’m getting at. If you’re struggling with dating, there must be something wrong with you—I literally had a guy friend once say that he believed that, almost verbatim. But he’s an outlier.
I’ll guess that for most of us, if a friend of ours is struggling with dating, we do not believe there’s anything wrong with them. However, we are probably more prone to believe this about ourselves. It’s hard to be vulnerable and talk about our insecurities with others—if we admit we’re having bad dating luck and we believe it’s our fault, it triggers fears of rejection and judgment.
For years in college, I’d straight up lie and make up stories rather than admit my insecurities. But when I found out certain friends actually had similar experiences, I was overcome with indescribable relief. It confirmed that I wasn’t alone or broken. Having these conversations with people we trust can be so healing.

Readers, I have something dark in my heart to confess: for the earlier years of my and Liz’s friendship, I had always assumed dating came effortlessly to her. In my defense, Liz is gorgeous, bubbly, whip-smart, and effervescent—she could strike fear and jealousy into the heart of Meg Ryan in the 1990s. My assumptions kept me from talking candidly with her about how bad dating was making me feel because surely, someone like Liz wouldn’t get it.

What bothers me is not just how wrong I was4 but that I could have been there for my friend rather than make her into competition. As we discussed the last time modern dating was the topic du jour, the male gaze eats away at all of us like termites in a suburban basement unless we stop it from permeating throughout our romantic lives. There are so many problems that come with dating as women that we’ve laid out here, there, and elsewhere, that we don’t need to be concocting more. Other women, whether they are “more successful” at dating than us or not, are not our enemies.

Now, as the song says, sincerity is scary so in the wake of all of this honesty, I obviously had to pivot and ask:

Emily: Fuck marry kill: Raya, Hinge, Tinder.
Liz: Kill them all? If I must: fuck Raya (everyone on it has abs), marry Hinge (they’re the least bad option), kill Tinder (does anyone still use Tinder?)5

Liz: Do you think you’ll have many loves throughout your life or one great love? (Or a third ambiguous option…)

Skylar: I have always, always said I think the concept of “one true love” is a bit…bullshit. Maybe it’s cynical, but I honestly believe that there are a million circumstances that affect your day-to-day life, and that also goes for the people you fall in love with.

The belief that there is only one love of your life is, often, just holding people back from being willing to let go of people or situations that may not actually be good for them, but they think it’s their only option. Also, I absolutely adore my friends, and I fall in love in love with them every day, in some ways. Love isn’t finite, and we don’t need to pretend like it is for the sake of a fairytale.

We get to decide what love looks like for us, and I think that’s the best part about it.

Love in the Time of Instagram

If I’m going to do anything here at E4P, it’s blame the problem at hand on any number of my foes: the GOP, capitalism, social media, or Ben Affleck. I was curious, after talking about dating via the internet, what Liz’s thoughts were about the role of digital life in general on modern romance.

I asked:

Emily: What do you think is the most notable impact social media has had on dating?
Liz: Everyone is familiar now with the concept of the idealized self—how our social media pages show a falsified version of ourselves to the world. And that’s just how it is! There’s no way to accurately portray your multifaceted self in a one-dimensional landscape. But the currency of likes and followers rewards the most falsified idealized images.
I think these false personas have migrated over to dating apps as well, not just in picking a highlight reel of photos and prompts for your profile but, more subtly and concerningly, in the way we interact with each other and think about others. It’s easy to dehumanize others on apps—reducing their whole personhood to whether their photos are lame, prompts are basic, or their height is an inch off of what we want.
And while apps add efficiency to the dating game, they also make it easier to take thought and empathy out of the equation. There’s always the potential to swipe on someone hotter, so why commit to one person? Or maybe the validation of receiving a like fuels you, so you only go on the app out of boredom, never actually engaging with anyone more than a few messages because that’s too much effort.
A dating influencer I follow has a great perspective on this: whenever you get worked up about a certain guy who liked you on Hinge or is constantly lurking on your stories with the occasional swipe up but never actually makes an effort, it means nothing. He is most likely bored and sitting on the toilet. While this advice is super helpful for remaining sane, it’s also depressing. Social media has changed the nature of human interaction, and platforms that were built to foster connection now only service validation. Everything feels half-hearted.

Liz (cont.): I firmly believe that dating in the wild is possible—if our parents’ generation did it, so can we. But I do think the advent of social media and dating apps has made meeting in the wild harder (even making friends is harder too!). For many people, the concept of finding dating prospects only exists in the context of a screen.
People are less likely to strike up a conversation because we’re less accustomed to having these in-person interactions—it’s scary when it’s not something you usually have to do. And when we meet someone new, one of our first instincts is to look them up online. Sure, it can give us information, but it can also add bias and assumptions about them. We’re not getting to know them from their perspective.
Trust me, I’m not trying to sound overly negative. The landscape has changed and this is all new—new challenges have arisen, and we have to figure out how to deal with them.

It’s hard to be a hopeless romantic at a time when romance kind of feels hopeless. Everything online is determined by an algorithm and everything offline feels determined by what happens online, namely with how everyone’s idealized selves make us feel in our realities. And yet, despite all of my bad luck, bad dates, and bad insecurities, I’ve always held tightly to the belief that I will end up happy in love in whatever shape it happens to take in my life—you know, hopelessly.

I say this because, for one thing, it was a major point Liz and I connected on as we gushed through the beginnings of this conversation. For another, I have grown tired of competing inside my head with people’s Instagram posts soft or hard launching their significant others, analyzing people’s engagement posts as if I’m in their relationship with them, or getting butt hurt when some guy doesn’t like my profile and, therefore, doesn’t like me.

I don’t know how to fully let go of the misleading expectations about love that have been instilled in us from young ages so I can’t offer that advice here. What I can do is try to end this conversation—which has by and large been a hopeful and refreshing one—on a forward-facing note, so I asked:

Emily: Is there any way around all of this, to find a love that exists in movies?
Liz: Well, not exactly, but I think you can come pretty close. It starts with doing the work on yourself: unlearning beliefs of unworthiness, looking at your traumas and your fears, and learning how to love yourself simply because you are. It starts with building a life that you love, that’s full and rich and satisfying outside of romance. The love you dream of is not going to come from you looking to fill whatever you believe is lacking within you, or to compensate for other unhappiness. You can find love in a hopeless place, but it may not be the healthiest.
I choose to believe that something greater is coming for me. And in the meantime, I’m going to work on building a joyful and rewarding life, and stay open to meeting new people.

Finally, to no one’s surprise, I couldn’t help but ask:

Emily: Do you believe in life after love?
Liz: If Cher says it, it must be true.

And I live by that.

Thank you so much to Liz for not only being so open and honest today but for getting me out of my comfort zone and taking me out last week!!! Just in case there are any hot, emotionally available guys in therapy reading this: she’s single!!!!