Some people aren’t remotely interested in dating, which makes perfect sense.
I am interested,
though, and I think it’s strange that others who’re (ostensibly) also looking for a partner sometimes seem eager
to maintain a level of
plausible deniability about
their search for
romance
Songs
Looking at the lyrics of songs supplied by the music industry
probably gives a decent idea of the emotional flavours that
listeners are demanding pithy expressions of, and it’s a fun place to start
in any case. There are plenty of songs about the heady thrill of an
early relationship, and the angst of unrequited love,
and the loneliness or empowerment of a breakup.
It seems like there are far fewer
about
wanting to be in love
That’s not to say there are none – I can think
of
a couple
Commitment
Something I noticed organising a speed dating event earlier in the year was that people were reluctant to suggest that they be attending with the aim of meeting someone to date:
I’d come along for the laughs
People were wary of even being associated with the event!
can you follow me back on oxheart otherwise its a bit embarrassing if ppl think im being unironic 😭💀
At the very start of a blind date I went on recently, my date
said that she’d signed up in order to
have a good story to tell
Let’s take a slight detour to think about another puzzle.
Why was I considering paying £100s to see Taylor Swift live on tour
when I could’ve just watched a recording of the whole set from home,
or (as I in fact have) gone along to Swiftogeddon?
And what’s the appeal of fancy balls when you could equally
well wear formal clothes and drink alcohol with friends someplace else? Yes, there’s
more of a spectacle, and yes, you can say
that
you were actually there * I have no idea whether there is any psychology / experimental philosophy
polling on this, so purely anecdotal. Among philosophers,
objective list theories are the most popular, with desire satisfaction next (and ahead of hedonism).
When I’ve bought expensive, hard-to-come-by tickets for something, I’ll think to myself « This is a special event! I had better make an extra big effort to enjoy it. » All the other attendees do the same, and since my enjoyment of an event is a function of everybody else’s enthusiasm, we’re all happy. I won’t feel embarrassed jumping out of my seat to sing along, or silly for spending lots of time choosing a nice outfit.
Since there aren’t that many people
who’ll commit to dance
regardless of whether anyone else does
Unless you know lots of other people who’re actively searching for a partner, you probably don’t want to single yourself out as being, well, single and searching. This characteristic then becomes a form of social dark matter.
Even if you’re on an app or at a speed dating event, if there are low barriers to being there, you might well be unwilling to accurately state your desire to be in a relationship. I suspect one reason high-end, bespoke matchmaking services have success is precisely because they’re expensive: being signed up to one signals a certain seriousness about your search.
Earnestness
I was chatting to a friend about this post the other day, and she was adamant that “wanting a partner is deeply unromantic”. Is it cringe to have crushes? Or is making an effort to find a relationship the specific thing to be avoided?
(I suspect the same friend might tell me that it’s also deeply unromantic to write blogposts pondering such things. Oh well.)
Kate Fox describes how Englishpeople value the “importance of not being earnest”. According to her, “seriousness is acceptable, [whilst] solemnity is prohibited”, but I don’t think it’s particularly obvious that romantic aspirations are on the impermissibly sombre side of the line.
An alternative explanation is that people have a perception that any truly desirable partner has far more important things going on in their life than the search for love.
Taylor Swift captures the attitude well in New Romantics:
We are too busy dancing
To get knocked off our feet
Sounding enthusiastic about dating implies that you really don’t want to be single, which might indicate that you’re easily bored, or overly needy, and therefore would make for a bad partner. What we have is a problem of adverse selection: the fact that someone is eager to find a partner and nonetheless is still single provides some evidence that other people don’t want to date them (for whatever reason), and you should steer clear too.
In other words, relationships can be something of a “self-effacing” goal – the more you strive towards one, the further away it gets. For now, I’ll keep holding out for someone who’s seriously romantic. And if that fails, I guess I’ll just have to figure out how to be less unironic 😭💀
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In my experience it’s surprisingly hard to find songs that match a specific mood. For instance, if I put “songs about wanting to be in love” into Spotify, the algorithmic playlists that come up don’t contain very many relevant songs. (Maybe this is because there are hardly any relevant songs – even the human-curated ones with related titles aren’t great.) And doing a web search, you just end up at SEO-maximised sites with hardly any useful information at all. I don’t know any AI tools that do this either – possibly it’s because companies are worried about copyright
ChatGPT’s system prompt warns it away from supplying song lyrics or recipes (or at least, it did in autumn 2023).? Anyway, this all means there could very well be other songs on the subject that I just haven’t heard of. That said, I asked a few friends with different tastes if they could think of any, and suggestions were scarce. Edit: a plethora of ideas from one person! A Love of Some Kind, Townie, Remember My Name (Mitski); Like The Movies, Falling Behind, Dear Soulmate (Laufey); I Can’t Wait to Meet You (Fiona Apple). Some of these mix wanting to love with wanting to be loved, but they all have at least a bit of the former sentiment (or can be interpreted that way). ↩︎