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The curse of Valentine’s Day The internet has killed off romance

'Our future belongs to Nature' (LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)

'Our future belongs to Nature' (LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)


February 14, 2024   6 mins

How St Valentine came to be associated with romance is disputed. Some suggest the third-century martyr’s feast “Christianised” a Roman fertility festival — but the first mention of his day in connection with love comes more than 1,000 years after his death, in Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules.

St Valentine’s is, in Chaucer’s telling, the day when the birds all find their mates, aided by a personified Nature. But the modern Valentine’s Day is less a moment for finding a mate than for celebrating those who already have one. What, then, of those still single? There are plenty of articles offering advice for coping on Valentine’s Day, suggesting that for some, it’s not a feast of smug coupledom but an annual reminder of loneliness.

And today, it’s not smug couples but lonely singles who are on the rise. This is the first Valentine’s Day since the US Surgeon General issued a public-health advisory warning that loneliness has reached epidemic levels. But loneliness reaches beyond America: single-person households are now a marker of wealthy societies across the world, and the only city that beats London for solo homes is Stockholm.

In the face of rising loneliness, growing numbers are seeking help in finding a mate. Unlike Chaucer’s birds, though, they’re turning not to “the noble goddesse Nature” but to technology — especially “social” media, and the online dating sites that now introduce more couples than real-world social networks.

It’s a poisoned chalice. For using digital platforms to make social connections is like repurposing a train carriage as a static home: you can do it, but you’re hacking something constructed to do the exact opposite. Without exception, the draw of digital devices and platforms is not their social but their antisocial nature: their capacity to liberate us from immediate reality and social context, in favour of worlds more tailored to individual preference. And while this is enticing to many, it’s not cost-free.

The cost is perhaps easiest to understand via a visually striking innovation: Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality goggles, which launched a week ago. This device, which looks like a space-age sleep mask, projects digitally-generated displays onto whatever the user is looking at in the real world. The displays are visible only to the user, and manipulated with gestures.

After the launch, viral videos swiftly appeared, depicting users appearing to use the goggles while seated in a self-driving car — or even, in one example, while “walking” a Boston Dynamics robotic dog. And while those videos were staged, the collective reaction to the world they portend has, rightly, been queasiness. For watching a Vision Pro user is unnerving. The user sees an augmented reality; everyone else sees someone with eyes covered, responding in inexplicable ways to stimuli only they experience.

But Vision Pro is only the most recent and visually intrusive instance of a shift towards a culture in which custom realities take precedence over flesh-and-blood ones. For example, it’s long been normal, in the kind of well-off cities where one-person households are on the rise, for people to stride about talking apparently to no one. This behaviour was once associated with acute schizophrenia; today it’s more likely to mean that person is on a call, via a wireless headset. And if gesticulating at nothing or talking into thin air on the street is an extreme example of tech-enabled withdrawal from “IRL”, a less dramatic one is far more pervasive: smartphones.

These grant every user access to a tailored virtual world, complete with stimuli no one else can access, plus sentient others who talk back. And much as with Vision Pro or the AirPod phone call, the experience for those around them is exclusion. How do you reach someone who is withdrawing into a parallel world? The internet is (perhaps ironically) full of essays on how to talk to someone who won’t put their phone down. Evidence is mounting, too, that this collective retreat into individualised digital realities is corroding even established relationships: a third of married Americans report that their spouse is often on his or her phone when they would prefer to do something IRL as a couple.

How, in that context, is anyone supposed to form a new relationship? Evidently, people do — often, indeed, with the help of the internet. But while there are plenty of happy long-term couples who met online, studies suggest that these digitally-forged relationships are somewhat less stable and satisfying than those where couples met through friends. Even where it helps connect us, after a fashion, these connections seem often of a different nature — and sometimes less robust.

But what can anyone do? As each of us withdraws into our virtual worlds, so real-world socialising attenuates, and with it the scope for meeting people any other way.

Dating platforms take the risk out of flirting, while increasing the pool; and should the tech-enabled search for connection get too exhausting, we can use the same tech to step back from connection, thanks to the platforms that, for many, comprise a growing proportion of social interaction. No wonder the generation born since the internet became ubiquitous — Gen Z — is the loneliest in history, and are especially short on those “fringe friends” you see occasionally, and who, perhaps, might be the ones to introduce you to The One.

“Dating platforms take the risk out of flirting.”

These technologies don’t so much mediate the real world, then, as colonise and replace it — while offering an illusion of liberation from the constraints of IRL. In this light, it’s perhaps easier to understand the dismay that greeted the “silent disco” which took place last week in Canterbury Cathedral. Defenders have pointed out that this is a long way from the first time alcohol has been served in a church, while concerts and other events often happen in these spaces. But it wasn’t the music, the booze, or even the dancing that prompted anger: it was the machine-mediated escape from reality. Christians rightly sensed that this rendered the silent disco a disturbing parody of another kind of communion, more commonly celebrated in the same space.

In my experience as a (now very) ex-raver, the core of the rave experience is paradoxical: a Dionysiac celebration of complete freedom to “be yourself” without inhibitions, but at the same time also to be part of something bigger: the crowd as a single, sweaty entity, fused by the beat. In this sense, there are parallels with older pagan religious events; but what distinguishes a rave from the great many ecstatic dance traditions is that it has no spiritual component at all, beyond what individuals ascribe to it for themselves. Its sole purpose is to provide a kind of unity-in-atomisation.

What holds the “congregation” together for this hedonistic rite of individuality is the music, overwhelmingly loud, enveloping everyone — the music, and the DJ. And here, the indissolubility of a rave from its enabling machinery comes into view: for a DJ is a kind of cyborg celebrant, whose power is equal parts human agency and tech scaffolding. A rave wouldn’t be the same without a live human on the decks; but without huge speakers, lights, atmospherics and so on, it wouldn’t really be a rave.

The silent disco takes this ritual fusion of man and machine still further. Now, it’s not just the DJ who can’t function without tech. At a silent disco, the same goes for the crowd: you aren’t enveloped by the beat, unless you don the special headset. Indeed, for someone without the kit, a “silent disco” looks as strange as a Vision Pro user, just at scale.

This also renders communicants at the disco even more atomised than the crowd at a rave. Whereas ravers are wrapped in sound, they can at least talk to one another, albeit at a yell. But those at the Silent Disco can’t communicate without breaking digital communion. If you want to hear another person speak, you have to remove the headphones, which means you’re no longer sharing the same sonic space as the dancers. Now, you’re just one of those outside the machine’s magic circle, watching people spasm in response to signals that aren’t there for you.

If a silent disco in the birthplace of English Christianity elicits revulsion where, say, a theatrical performance or concert does not, this is because it’s not just a secular use of a sacred space, but a parodic one: a caricature of Holy Communion in which salvation from solitude comes not through physically sharing in the body and blood of God, but via a headset that grants access to machine-mediated unity. From the perspective of a faith grounded in the incarnation of God as Man, it’s hard to think of a word that describes this with sufficient force except “blasphemy”.

That the Anglican leadership cannot see this is troubling, to say the least. But perhaps this isn’t so strange, coming from bishops who shrugged and acceded to “Zoom church” in 2020 with barely a murmur; and who, for months on end, mouthed words about incarnation before a “virtual” congregation. Nor, perhaps, should we be surprised that many who make up these congregations have not, since Covid, re-materialised.

Thus it seems we’re becoming lonelier in direct proportion to how fully we embrace the digital illusion. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the first location to declare loneliness a “public health emergency” is a California county that includes part of Silicon Valley. But when even leaders in a Church founded on a theology of indissoluble matter and spirit embrace our collective tech-mediated withdrawal, what hope is there for the rest of us against its allure?

I don’t think there is an easy answer. Nor do I claim any special ability: like most, I find putting the phone down a constant struggle. But while it’s perhaps cold comfort, on Valentine’s Day of all days, there is one positive here. If tech makes us lonely, and humans are fundamentally social animals, it stands to reason that those who survive this cultural pinch-point in good enough shape to form relationships and have kids won’t necessarily be the smartest, the richest, or the most sophisticated. Rather, they’ll be those who value the human yearning for connection, culture, and an IRL future enough to outweigh the allure of digital realities.

The future, then, belongs to those who can resist the digital siren-song. In other words: much as in Chaucer’s time, our human future belongs to Nature, and to God.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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David Lindsay
David Lindsay
9 months ago

What is all this fuss about having “booked a table” for this evening? How do you know that she even likes snooker? Valentine’s Day should be moved permanently to Ash Wednesday:

Roses are red,

The colour of rust;

Remember, O Man,

That thou art dust.

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
9 months ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

True, too True – and yet . . .

The crystal streamlets
Gently fa’ –
The Merry Birds
Are Lovers a’ !!!

andy young
andy young
9 months ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

I can’t help feeling that there should be a ‘but’ in front of dust to make it scan (?) properly.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
9 months ago
Reply to  andy young

Not really , two 5 syllable lines between two four syllable lines

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
9 months ago

Welcome to the future:

https://youtube.com/shorts/LBGxlV2_Kyw?feature=share

Jokes aside, I have heard that p0rn in VR is extremely visceral. Not sure how it will be dealt with if VR headsets take a real hold.

LeeKC C
LeeKC C
9 months ago

And may heaven help those who look up and around instead of down, so to speak. I’m with you Mary.

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
9 months ago

I too used to be convinced the future belongs to those who can resist the digital siren-song and much else besides. Richard Dawkin’s memes (inherited beliefs, behaviour, memory) as well as selfish genes self-evidently dictate the future, and surely these are inherited from socially successful procreating parents?

More recently I’ve read policy notes from both the Departments for Health and Education and I’m not quite so sure. The digital citizen and transgender educational agendas are intended to divorce children from biological and social reality, verging on something approximating to sterile transhumanism.

Realising that most parents are repulsed by these agendas, the Departments increasingly see themselves engaged in a secret Aristotelian war for children’s minds (and bodies) against the parents. The parental memes that, amongst other things, were sufficiently successful to procreate apparently are dangerous and need to be overwritten by a state that knows best.

There are numerous reasons why these Departments are desperate to inculcate everyone’s children with the collectively sanctioned memes of the Departments. The age old authoritarian “just because” is one. Another is the state recognises multiculturalism is in fact a threat to many “modern” societal norms that are disproportionally common within these Departments. The most pernicious though is the childless professional (also disproportionally common) who theoretises parenting with no practical concept of actual parenting and condems real parents’ parenting for deviating from a contrived model of parenting.

Due to incremental legal changes over more than a century, the state has now assumed huge legal power over parenting and children. All for the best possible reasons, naturally, nonetheless, that power exists and is now being used in unexpected ways. I think few of us even a decade ago could imagine children being conferred with sexual identities and encouraged to undergo sterilisation without parental knowledge by teachers and social workers, yet here we are. Nor would many of us expect our children to be forced by schools to use tablets all day and be reduced to digital avatars, but that too is now common.

Only the most militant belief systems might be resistant to the mind virus that infects these Departments and the institutions they fund. Yet even Islam is yielding with its increasing acceptance of transgenderism as an approximate fix for the sin of homosexuality (quite where gay people will stand in this brave new world is anyone’s guess).

However, bigger and more powerful than any government department is technological progress. Looming on the horizon is transhumanist reproduction: the creation of children outside of biological constraints, perhaps even with no parents in a sense we understand today. Freed completely from gene and meme inheritance, the future might belong to those who not only follow the technical siren song but are creations of it.

So the question is this: is there a sufficiently robust belief system to not just save people from the socially destructive whims of bureaucratic overlords, not just to save people from a sterile transhumanist future for themselves, but also to out compete transhumanist reproduction?

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
9 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

Skilfully deployed arguments there.

I’d argue, however, that it’s “belief systems” that have brought us to this point; or more precisely, the nature of “belief” itself, which leads to inevitable breakdown of itself with disillusionment in its wake.

Disillusionment – which can be both negative, as in “discouraged” but also positive as in “free from illusion”. The real question is how do we turn the negative sense into the positive, and start to embrace our humanity rather than seek to escape it.

The use of technology at the individual level may be changing the nature of our consciousness, in an evolutionary sense. For the first time, we’re becoming directly “plugged in” to the rest of humanity: the internet as a giant mirror reflecting us all back to ourselves. Many will find this hard to bear, and seek to escape; others will be more brave. Those who are more brave will be so by looking into themselves, and not shying away into the anaesthesia of belief systems.

Darwin K Godwin
Darwin K Godwin
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

The “anaesthesia of belief systems.” Ah, the forward march of human deconstruction, where faith becomes a point of ridicule, and hope a detriment.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
9 months ago

Far from it, and i’m far from being a deconstructionist.
My point is that hope is best preserved in the human breast by not seeking to adhere to belief systems which – when they turn out to be fundamentally flawed, as they ALL are – causes havoc. There is another way, which is to seek to understand ourselves and our humanity better, rather than looking to a non-existent deity for a false explanation, and false hope.
Deconstruct that.

Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

As said by David Lindsay (above?) “Man Though Art Dust” ? That’s it?

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
9 months ago
Reply to  Richard Pearse

Use your imagination, rather than relying on a belief system.
I can’t imagine anything more wonderful and exciting than coming to the realisation that we’re the product of entirely random chance, and yet consciousness allows us to seek to understand precisely that. All attempts to “explain” how and why we’re here by recourse to divine intervention will fail. There is no “why”. Nor is it necessary!
Once you embrace that, an entire new world of possibilities opens up. Many already have.

Russell Sharpe
Russell Sharpe
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Earlier on you talked about understanding human consciousness “in an evolutionary sense”. Now you talk about the exciting vistas that open up upon the realisation that “we’re the product of entirely random chance”.
Evolution is not the product of entirely random chance. It’s pretty much exactly the opposite, as the term ‘natural selection’ makes clear. I suppose you mean that the outcomes of evolutionary change were not already embedded in the process as a conscious telos from the beginning, but that is quite a different thing.
BTW Relativity seems to imply a block universe, in which past, present and future are functions of where one stands and how one moves. This would imply that our future is ‘already’ as real as the present or the past. If that’s right, there is no scope for entirely random chance, whatever the quantum mechanics may say. I mention this not to endorse the idea, but simply to warn against an overhasty application of scientific-sounding terms to derive conclusions about human meaning and purpose.

Michael Cavanaugh
Michael Cavanaugh
9 months ago
Reply to  Russell Sharpe

. . . random variation plus selective retention . . .

Marc M
Marc M
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Having been primarily a “lurker” for quite awhile I felt the urge to jump in here to say I remain fascinated by your point of view, which in my mind begs some questions. For instance: why do you seemingly lump all belief systems together under the heading of “recourse to divine intervention”? Do you distinguish what you propound (your view of the world) as something other than a belief system? If it’s not a belief system, then what is it? When you propose using one’s imagination is this based upon evidentiary facts or immutable laws rather than your own belief system? If you do accept that you have your own belief system on what basis do you, ahem, believe that your system is far and above superior to every other belief system out there? And finally, if the vast majority of humanity throughout our history has operated under “belief systems” (as you would label it) resulting in wars, famine, etc., then what makes you, again, believe that somehow humanity has the inherent capability to somehow change course. It would seem to me that what you long for could only come about by, as you say elsewhere, people with “strength of mind to embrace it but retain our humanity and social awareness whilst doing so” changing that course. Do you have empirical evidence to suggest this to be even remotely possible, absent annihilation of the vast majority of humanity who, quite simply, don’t have that strength of mind, given their idiotic recourse to divine intervention?

Carl Valentine
Carl Valentine
9 months ago
Reply to  Marc M

Guys… You are taking yourselves a little too seriously, this is about Valentines? 🙂

Clare Knight
Clare Knight
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Well said.

Ian Barton
Ian Barton
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Our main hope is that those who have the “strength of mind” to see beyond belief systems, will also have the strength be able to see beyond – and resist – the digital world.
The question is how many of these people will exist – and will there be enough of them to be able to procreate and keep those memes/genes alive.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
9 months ago
Reply to  Ian Barton

There’s another possibility, and that’s to “move towards the danger”.
Technology isn’t going away, but what’s required is sufficient strength of mind to embrace it but retain our humanity and social awareness whilst doing so.

Nell Clover
Nell Clover
9 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

Anecdotally and by a raw count of those with sufficient confidence in the future to positively choose having children, it would seem those with strong belief are not yet at this “point”. The largest group of people at this “point” are Westerners living secular lives.

Those living more religious lives yet still within the Western world are seemingly coping better. Where disillusionment in its broadest sense is most strong is amongst the secular, the non-believers. As an atheist myself, it is obvious that there has been a concerted campaign to discredit the common, existing belief systems by people like me (if not me personally). We have kicked away societal props we didn’t need without caring for the consequence and effect on others.

Where once there was belief now there is a big fat nothing that can give any support or meaning in the times of crisis and doubt we all face from time to time. Everywhere you see those without belief desperately trying to find belief in something.

The increasing zeal with which agendas such as EDI and climate change are pursued I think reflects those activists’ need to belive in something. Momentum and Corbyn tapped into a strong desire in young people for some sort of mission. But with so many competing and incompatible alternative belief systems on offer, and secular belief systems often rooted in pesky and often contrary reality, this inevitably leads to social and political conflict, distrust, and disillusionment.

The confident, growing civilisations of the 21st century are not Western, secular nations.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
9 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

I’d argue that those “growing civilisations” are not as confident as you might imagine. They’re based upon very high levels of citizen control, which is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Stephen Bloom
Stephen Bloom
9 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

I would just remind you that all “systems” whether physical or metaphysical start with an axiom. Perception of any type rests on the axiom of “I am real.”

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
9 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

The answer to your question is yes, a traditional Classical Education, but preferably rid of the miasma of Christianity.
A sound knowledge Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Caesar etc etc will provide one with a perfect antidote to this looming ‘horror show’ that you have so succinctly
described.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
9 months ago
Reply to  Nell Clover

There are numerous reasons why these Departments are desperate to inculcate everyone’s children with the collectively sanctioned memes of the Departments. — The key reason remains as old as man – totalitarians always come for the children. Always. Every vile regime that has existed had a youth wing designed to break family bonds and marinate the young in a belief system that few people would willingly join.

Archibald Tennyson
Archibald Tennyson
9 months ago

Mary, I appreciate your line your argument, but your point about wireless earphones is a bit extreme. This is simply a more convenient way of having a phone call, one that frees up your hands while you speak. Though this can certainly be done in an antisocial way, I don’t think it belongs in the same category as using an Apple Vision. At least the person is actually talking to another human being on a wireless phone call. To me, that makes it less of a retreat into the Matrix than playing Candy Crush, scrolling Instagram, or doing other solitary smartphone activities.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
9 months ago

Perhaps by degrees, but it’s still very disconcerting seeing people walking around seeming to talk to themselves, until you realise they’re on a call.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
9 months ago

Frees up your hands to do what, distract your attention from the person on the other end of the phone? That’s the thing about these devices – they are signals that we value what is happening on them more than any interaction with another person. Have the phone call and just the phone call. Everything else will still be there.

Pat Davers
Pat Davers
9 months ago

“If a silent disco in the birthplace of English Christianity elicits revulsion where, say, a theatrical performance or concert does not, this is because it’s not just a secular use of a sacred space, but a parodic one”
Yes. To the point that if a writer were to write such an event into a novel, he or she would be accused by critics of employing crude and heavy-handed symbolism.

Lennon Ó Náraigh
Lennon Ó Náraigh
9 months ago

The trouble is, tech has placed an expensive interface between all relationships, not just romantic ones. You can’t hail a taxi, talk to someone in a bank, talk to a teacher in your child’s school, or check your child’s homework, without going through an expensive “platform”. At the height of the Covid madness you even needed a QR code to eat in a restaurant. And yet this is making ordinary life much less efficient, as pointed out on these pages a few weeks ago by Jamie Bartlett (“Techno-admin will run your life”). The question then is, qui bono? At the risk of going a little bit Marxist for a second, when every cent of profit has been eked out of productive enterprise, the only avenue left for profit is to commodify the most basic relationships between individuals.

ralph bell
ralph bell
9 months ago

Exactly, and in the USA where this is exacerbated people deal only via apps to book trasnport and enter hotels/air B&B’s with no human contact at all. Very problematic if not tech savy or any IT/password issues…

N Satori
N Satori
9 months ago

So loneliness has reached epidemic levels has it? That’ll be another of those health crises that journalists like to panic us with. A few years ago Cultural Autism was the buzz-term. Apparently, the robot-loving Japanese are particularly prone to the condition.
Expect a flurry of articles on the topic over the next few days as every windbag with a copy deadline to meet offers their predictable “insights” and handwringing concern about the corrosive effects of the digital age. Perhaps we will be reminded again of EM Forster’s strangely prophetic (but also misleading) story The Machine Stops.
Women, incidentally, have always been fond of telling us that something or other has killed off romance. Machines are a ready target because they are so expressive of masculine power – in opposition to mother nature, I expect. If you were to ask me (which nobody ever does) feminism has killed romance stone dead.

Chris Van Schoor
Chris Van Schoor
9 months ago
Reply to  N Satori

Sadly people who are experiencing the very real ache and misery of loneliness will find your piece rather flippant..

N Satori
N Satori
9 months ago

The following quip, originally made about politics, would fit perfectly with psychotherapy:
[Psychotherapy] is the art of ‘looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies
Groucho Marx

Susan Grabston
Susan Grabston
9 months ago

Mary, some of us have arrived at a point where we can’t remember when we met, let alone remember 14th February. That said, I am so blessed. A wonderful kind, thoughtful man whose measured temperament and steady hand on our shared tiller has proved capable of co-navigating all weathers. Amor vincit dies.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
9 months ago

Big changes start with small steps: set down that smartphone for 15 minutes and have a face to face conversation with someone. Put down the game console and go have a drink with a couple of friends. If you’re in an office building, pull out the earbuds during lunch and eat with a colleague in the breakroom or, even better, a nearby restaurant.
Go to church, join the local theater, or take a class. You don’t have to permanently unplug; just do it for a short spell. It’s called living and it involves interacting with other people in a non-digital manner. I can be as guilty of screen gazing as anyone else but there are places that devices does not go. Because it has no place there and because the rest of the world will be okay if I don’t check on it for whatever period of time is involved.

laurence scaduto
laurence scaduto
9 months ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

I quit smoking gradually. First, no morning cigarette, then none til lunch. I stopped smoking outdoors. I made a ten-minute-rule; whenever I reached for one I would put it down and wait ten minutes. Then I stopped smoking in front of other people. (Except if we were drinking!) Eventually, I just stopped altogether.
A similar approach might work well with that smart phone that’s ruining your life. In both cases half of the problem is just physical; figuring out what you’re going to do with your hands if you’re not playing with your phone/cigarette.

William Shaw
William Shaw
9 months ago

“Dating platforms take the risk out of flirting.”
And a good thing too since these days any approach by a man risks being labelled a sexual assault.

jane baker
jane baker
9 months ago

Romance is real,the romance of an enchanted sunset,the unexpected beauty of a burst of flowers just open all at once after having been in tight bud for ages and even yesterday. That’s romance. I once saw the play The Rivals at Bath Theatre Royal. Mrs Malaprop deplores her wards addiction to the new literary form, novels,these stories are filling her head with silly ideas. A young soldier of Officer class is wooing the ward Sophia. He’s under a pretence he is a cadet as he knows the girl will identity herself as one of the heroines in the stories she reads,the wealthy young lady who runs off with the penniless man she loves.
But actually he wants Sophia AND her fortune,he wants both. In a different way he is of the same mind as Mrs Malaprop but he is turning it to his advantage. So Romance as part of man/woman relationships has always been tempered by real life concerns.
I know a few people who met their partner online+ they are all well suited and happy and feel it’s much better than hanging about in bars or “discos” like in the old days when there was inevitably alcohol involved and you took a chance on the one who caught your eye not being in your lifestyle band ( it matters) or income band ( ditto) or education achievement band,or life ambition band etc..
Pairing up the emotional ideas of Romance with the legal status idea of marriage was never a great idea.