Do People Still Fall In Love?
Passion is missing in action.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
Love isn’t trending, have you noticed? Love used to be the most popular kid in school, everyone felt excited to enter its inner circle. Love was it. I’m a child of 90s RomComs for crying out loud—I remember a day when love was everywhere, and appealed to everyone. People used to want to fall in love, and now I’m worried that some of us maybe want to fall in love if the right person miraculously materializes but we’re not hanging any hopes on that, because these days the gender we’re attracted to thinks love is some kind of trick.
Heterosexual men used to want to fall in love, too. Before the podcasts, before the vibrant death rattle of patriarchy that we’re suffering now, men used to view falling in love as a good thing. Connections with women were something worth pursuing, there was desire there. When I was a kid, boys liked girls. That’s not to say all courtship narratives from childhood were positive, but the general sentiment remained: We were drawn to each other. Now in an adulthood with healthier narratives about emotional labor, household balance, and romantic equality, women aren’t participating in the bare minimum from men, and men are only willing to do the bare minimum because they’ve been convinced that women are con artists. We are at an impasse, and love is the casualty. I’m not writing this from a place of sadness or unfulfillment. I’m writing it so you don’t think for one second that it’s your fault.