Arranged marriages long ago disappeared from the secular West. Yet marriage and dating are becoming functions of caste once more. This time, it’s dating apps that determine caste, with status signals subtly baked into almost every social-media platform. From Elo scores measuring attractiveness and social desirability to the number of followers to filters used to keep out the lowly, measurable network effects and behavioural engineering regulate how we think and what we’re supposed to feel, structuring our choices in profound but often invisible ways.
Welcome to the situationship economy.
Created by algorithms, this is a culture in which social status, geography, money, and convention are empowered to choose for us in ways that resemble premodern mores. Instead of meddling, class-conscious parents, there is now an array of buzzing sensors and guardrails, indifferent to the pulses of romance and demoralising to anyone who would like to imagine that they are free to choose.
This was not always the case. The period between 1965 and 2012, roughly between the Sexual Revolution and the rise of dating apps, was a transformative era for American romance. During this time, most of the country adopted the sexual and relationship mores once associated with beatniks and bohemians. Premarital sex and cohabitation became normalised. Marriages lost any vestigial signs of being arranged — whether by parents, pastors, community elders, or extended families — and both marriage and dating became fully marketised.
Gradually, as coupling became shaped more by the market than by community ties, Americans embraced what might be called a cult of choice: the belief in finding the perfect person, a beloved who might have been inaccessible under previous forms of marriage shaped by custom and convention. This led to an explosion of spontaneous desire and also to great unhappiness; mid-century portrayals of marriage were not exactly hopeful or happy.
In film and literature of the era, this disillusionment is palpable. Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) depicts the strained marriage of Maggie and Brick Pollitt, held together only by money and status — an aristocratic Southern power marriage gone wrong. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is similarly pessimistic. Richard Yates’s powerful 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, takes us through the unraveling suburban marriage of Frank and April Wheeler, both of whom dream of art, sex, and bohemia in the city.
A few years later, Esther Greenwood, in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), views marriage as a trap and fears becoming like her mother. In Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), George and Martha, a couple from the Northeastern elite and a good class match, stay together, but their marriage is desperate and miserable. In Nichols’s next film, The Graduate (1967), Benjamin Braddock is seduced by Mrs. Robinson, a woman of the previous generation, who is trapped in a bad marriage sustained only by alcohol and convention. All of these portrayals, in their own way, echo Madame Bovary — the ur-text for the discontents of the modern bourgeoisie.
There was a clear shift in the emphasis of culture narratives in the Eighties, a period of economic deregulation and globalisation: stories of unhappy marriages were discarded in favour of successful dating stories, in which love as a personal, autonomous, market-based solution triumphs. After 1980 — and after the Aquarian, punk, experimental Seventies — something shifted in American romantic culture: middle-class dating and marriage were re-conceived as free choice, without the vestigial social expectations that produced mid-century ennui; dating became liberatory and coupling an achievement, not a sacrifice.
Sex, dating, and marriage became totally liberalised, subject to the adjudication of the marketplace. A corollary social myth arose in which the liberated choice of partner was the only relationship that couldn’t be socially constructed (though of course, it was mediated silently by the market instead). Culture circled back towards Jane Austen and away from Bovary. The romantic comedy became the primary vehicle through which two individuals navigated class and social pressures to find true love, guided by both emotion and reason, rather than the bourgeois tragedy in which moderately unfree people suffer at each other’s hands.
When Harry Met Sally (1989) introduces two yuppies who convert friendship into genuine love. Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Notting Hill (1999) celebrate unions that defy social expectations, pairing Brits and Americans in a globalised culture that allows more choice, more freedom, and more happiness. The deeply romantic Before Sunrise (1995) begins with an American (Ethan Hawke), at the end of a study abroad trip, meeting a French woman (Julie Delpy) on a train; the early-Nineties romantic world is open and exciting and full of possibility. Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998) has two yuppies converting a business rivalry into love. The movie begins as a story about internet retail destroying brick-and-mortar bookstores, but love ends up overcoming the trauma of neoliberalism; Meg Ryan, the shop owner, falls for Tom Hanks, the big-box-store guy; romance redeems economic antagonism. Both Seinfeld and Sex and the City, canonical Nineties TV shows, feature successful protagonists who are always dating, never settling.
After 2010, however, the magic ran out, giving rise to today’s neo-feudal order, with algorithms now playing the role of stern parents and village busybodies. The 2010 cult hit Blue Valentine marks this shift: free romantic choice across class barriers leads to tragedy, embarrassment. Yuppie, Boomer optimism is gone; Millennial pessimism has arrived.
In this era, romance is less about love, and more about whether you’ve made it; fame first, pair-bonding second or third or fourth. Lorde’s breakthrough 2013 song “Royals” commences the decade’s obsession with status and status cosplay. In Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, career frustrations demolish a loving union. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s seminal series Fleabag is about someone who is basically unlovable or incapable of love.
“Social status, geography, money, and convention are empowered to choose for us in ways that resemble premodern mores.”
Charli XCX’s 2020 song “Forever” crystallises the final transition out of the rom-com economy, in which choice was validated, into the long-gestating situationship economy of today, in which real choice is impossible — and infinitely delayed. “Forever” is sung from the point of view of a fragmented consciousness which idealises what will never be, and has never been, experienced: rooted, historically mediated, lasting love.
Similarly, the 2020 High Fidelity reboot, starring Zoë Kravitz, takes a beloved Gen-X rom-com and turns it into a depressive, sepia-toned portrait of consumerist dissatisfaction. The market works in the 2000 movie, adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel. But in the 2020 TV show, the market is broken. The record-store hipster in the original can still find a love that suits his tastes; in the remake, she can’t.
This breakdown of personal choice mirrors a larger collapse of faith in the systems that once promised abundance and connection.
The situationship economy — the reversion to caste-like determinism without the definitiveness of arranged marriage — is a subtle and invisible reversal of a period in which culture celebrated romantic choice (the rom-com economy), the culture in which people born between 1980 and 2010 were raised, but not the one they inherited (or helped create). The learned expectation, in other words, is of freedom of choice. But reality — post-iPhone and, increasingly, post-AI — is morbidly deterministic.
As with economic liberalisation, the irony of romantic liberalisation is that it has given birth to its opposite: a feeling of extreme overdetermination and the submission to the algorithm and to the social logic embedded within it. Gone is the post-globalisation fantasy of finding a partner in another part of the world or across economic classes via an Austen-like combination of reason and heady emotion. Trump-era tariffs and economic recalibration register this cultural shift in the material realm.
From 1980 to 2010, singles were entrepreneurs within the romance market; after 2010, they increasingly became raw resources to be extracted and packaged. We have been trained to sell ourselves as products, to expect that our “product” can be ranked, and to believe we deserve products of a similar ranking. Men and women alike, though differently, now obsessively assert their preferences on apps like Hinge: height, weight, age, religion, politics. “No Trump supporters. No one under six feet. No one over 25. Not looking for anything serious.” These aren’t the views or behaviours of people who believe that love is a harmonious pattern of extremely complex attitudes. They are rather the views of people in thrall to a brutal utilitarian logic and a vision of social class as an insuperable barrier.
The lesson here is that every era of romance, love, dating, and marriage is historically conditioned. Through a secular lens, no specific romantic arrangement or habit can assert itself as the definitive or universal one. Yet, paradoxically, by removing romantic blinders and seeing ourselves as products of social and historical conditioning — acknowledging that dark truth — we can pay heed to elements of a common and continuing human condition: our deeper potential to take an active, rather than passive, role in our fundamental commitments and choices.
For Jane Austen is finally preferable to Flaubert; Elizabeth and Darcy to Charles and Emma. The classic rom-coms still delight. There’s something moving about the possibility of two people choosing each other outside of the forcefield of social mores and pressures. But what makes romance funny, what brings delight, and not tragedy, is always an element of cynicism, of world-weariness and foresight on the part of the protagonists; love doesn’t start with illusions; it must construct practical visions to replace them first. Pride and prejudice — or in our case, technological addiction and moral passivity — must be overcome.
