How the internet perverts desire Online longing is quasi-pornographic

Romantic love, one of the great organising forces in Western societies, is in crisis. Just look at the low fertility rates, and correspondingly high rates of singleness and sexlessness, in the contemporary West.

Or take divorce. Even high-profile advocates for stable romantic relationships such as Rod Dreher and Andrew Sullivan have spoken about the breakdown of their marriages. Both writers disagree about a number of issues, gay marriage chief among them. But they both celebrate marriage, based on romantic love, as a stabilising force in a fraying society. Accordingly, it seems highly valuing love in one’s personal life, and even promoting it as a political force, is not enough to guarantee long-lasting desire. Romantic love, clearly, demands reconsideration.

There is no better guide to this urgent task than Eva Illouz, the world’s leading sociologist of love. Her first study of the topic, Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997), explores how, over the past century, Westerners have tried to reconcile their characteristic jumble of conflicting wishes and goals: to “fall in love” and be swept away by passion, to meet a proper spouse and share a stable household, to be equal to and independent of one’s partner while preserving certain eroticised elements of the older inegalitarian system of gender (we may expect men, for example, to ask women out, and initiate sex, while punishing awkward or ill-timed advances as masculinist aggression). We put incredible, even impossible, demands on love — and on our lovers.

Our pre-modern ancestors would have found it odd to imagine romantic love as the basis of stable relationships in which children are raised and property transmitted. They tended to see passion as a force that was perhaps exalted, even divine, but certainly out of the ordinary, and most probably a threat to the rational management of such important matters as marriage. We, in contrast (and with some self-contradiction), often consider love to be both a powerful, disruptive emotion that falls on us out of the blue and also a connection between well-suited individuals who can build a common life. We think of families no longer as lineages that perpetuate themselves through alliances, but as small units founded on love. Love is now expected to accomplish a lot.

But many individuals do still manage to have reasonably happy romantic relationships today — especially in the middle and upper classes. The class character of contemporary romantic success — that is, the collapse of marriage among the working classes —suggests that the ability to fulfil romantic aspirations, like economic ones, is increasingly dependent on “soft skills” from which too many individuals are excluded. Sustaining relationships despite the multiple, contradictory demands that we place on them, requires that romantic partners have a sophisticated capacity to recognise, articulate, and respect their own and other people’s emotions. Perhaps the central skill transmitted in couple’s therapy is the ability to say “I’m feeling” this or that.

Illouz’s cautious optimism about contemporary love, tempered with a Leftist critique of satisfying relationships becoming the privilege of the well-off like steady work and healthcare, has collapsed over the following decades. Across hundreds of interviews conducted throughout the world, she has studied the effects of the internet on dating and desire, and come to troubling conclusions.

In this she is hardly alone. A number of contemporary philosophers, such Byung-Chul Han and Alain Badiou criticise online dating. They take the popularity of apps like Tinder to be symptomatic of the loss of concrete, particular forms of attachment in an increasingly atomised and virtualised world. They observe that people on such platforms encounter each other, and present themselves, as commodities.

Illouz echoes some of these concerns, but goes beyond the backward-looking lamentations of critical theorists. Her first sustained analysis of internet-based romance, appearing in Cold Intimacies (2007), points to the ways that dating online resembles shopping. More originally, it also attends to the disillusioned resignation of her interviewees about the “dating market”, which they saw as simultaneously hopeless and inescapable. As she said, “this cynicism marks a radical departure from the traditional culture of romanticism”, and seems to arise, in part, from “the routinisation produced by the sheer volume of encounters”. After flipping through 500 profiles on Tinder, one is naturally cynical about love. And one keeps flipping.

In her next sustained study of how the internet is changing practices and ideas of contemporary romance, Why Love Hurts (2012), Illouz took her thinking a step further. Our desire today is shadowed not only by cynicism, produced by the predictable, endlessly re-iterable character of online dating, but also by the internet’s lure of information. Whether we match with someone on an app, or fall for them first by encountering their social media profile, we can gather a great deal of information about them without ever meeting them in person.

In the past, falling in love with a stranger would mean first seeing a beautiful body, which would incite idealisation and fantasy. For some famous lovers, like Dante or Petrarch, such a vision of the beloved might be an end in itself. In more ordinary cases, the lover could, with effort, learn more about the person whose beauty had so dazzled him or her, and gradually that knowledge would allow the sometimes overwhelming passion of love to become a stabler foundation for a lifelong match.

Today, however, we can accumulate a great deal of knowledge about someone prior to seeing them as an embodied person. It is easy, and common, to “cyber-stalk” a crush, or to become a “simp” fixated on a person whom one has never met, but whose tastes, travels, friends, etc., one knows in apparently intimate detail. Illouz argues that when we do this, our “emotions are largely self-generated… anchored in technological objects that objectify and make present the virtual person”. Rather than being directed towards the person with whom we are apparently obsessed, this form of internet-based romantic imagination allows us to manipulate a series of virtual objects (profiles, posts, information gleaned from searches) to sustain pleasurable feelings in solitude.

Much like the consumption of pornography, these practices do bear witness to desire, but desire in a peculiar form, one that Illouz argues is poorly suited to be a foundation for the pursuit and continuance of romantic connection. Where thinkers such as Han and Badiou see our increasingly internet-based society as an emotional wasteland from which desire has been banished, Illouz perceives that the internet fuels an intense, unusual kind of desire that we struggle to integrate into our traditional ideas about love.

Quasi-pornographic, self-generated desire, like pervasive cynicism, arises almost inevitably out of our experience of encountering other people through the internet. Both, in different ways, disrupt the possibility of moving successfully from an initial idealisation of the other person to a real, sustainable relationship with them. This strange form of desire incites us to see the other as a set of data points to be manipulated for the purpose of private fantasising; while cynical thinking leads us to see the other as one of a vast number of interchangeable such sets available online, behind none of which is a real person to love us. Gooner-ism and doomer-ism go hand-in-hand, combining a pornographic form of yearning and a pessimistic vision of the world to reinforce already lonely individuals’ isolation from each other.

The mismatch between our historically unprecedented experiences of internet-driven, self-generated, cynical desire, on the one hand, and, on the other, our received ideas about how erotic longings can connect us to other people, seems to be confirmed in, for example, the writing of literary critic Becca Rothfeld. In a disturbing essay, she describes her cyber-stalking of an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend as a paradigmatic case of falling in love, and a lesson on the apparent impossibility of truly knowing another person — rather than, as Illouz might help us see it, a peculiarly recent form of playing with one’s own feelings, a kind of emotional and intellectual masturbation, against which critics might do well to start their own “No Fap” movement.

Taking love seriously as a political issue, as something critical to private and collective life that is over-burdened with conflicting demands, eroded by economic inequalities and perverted by the internet, demands more than the wankery of personal essays or the impotent exhortations of Dreher and Sullivan. It would require a new ethics of erotic life. While therapists can teach us how to name, regulate and govern our emotions, and moral traditions teach us to channel our sexual desires, we are now entering an uncharted territory in which our feelings and longings increasingly orient us away from, rather than towards, other people.

But, amid all the morbid aspects of internet-based pseudo-sociality, people do, in some cases, meet online and successfully transition into real relationships. Some people are, in spite of everything, still happily in love — and all of us have a stake in understanding how they manage to do it. If we build on Illouz’s work, adapting it to an extremely online era, we can ask what skills (management of emotion, desire, and perhaps especially, attention) permit love to survive, and how they can be taught to the seemingly growing and large number of people who lack them.

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Blake Smith is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. A historian of modern France, he is also a translator of contemporary francophone fiction and a regular contributor to Tablet.

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