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 demoralizing to anyone who would like to imagine that they are free to choose.

More from this author

I can’t believe I fancied David Walliams

By Matthew Gasda

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 normalized. Marriages lost any vestigial signs of being arranged — whether by parents, pastors, community elders, or extended families — and both marriage and dating became fully marketized.

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.

Suggested reading

The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matthew Gasda

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 globalization: stories of unhappy marriages were discarded in favor 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 liberalized, 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.

Suggested reading

Did heteropessimism kill the rom-com?

By Kat Rosenfield

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 globalized 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.

Charli XCX’s 2020 song “Forever” crystallizes 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 idealizes 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.

Suggested reading

Inside the Gen Z sex war

By Poppy Sowerby

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 liberalization, the irony of romantic liberalization 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-globalization 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 behaviors 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.

Suggested reading

Is dating discrimination?

By Ralph Leonard

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.

Into this swamp of heteropessimism wades Curtis Sittenfeld, with the new novel, Romantic Comedy. Her protagonist, Sally, a writer for a late-night comedy show, invents the “Danny Horst Rule” — to describe the propensity of her male colleagues to date out of their league. (The character after which it is named is a thinly-veiled avatar for Pete Davidson; Night Owls, the comedy show, for Saturday Night Live.) Women in the industry, Sally notes, never manage to do the same.

“Enter Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models,” reads the blurb. He and Sally hit it off “instantly, and as they collaborate on one sketch after another, she begins to wonder if there might actually be sparks flying. But this isn’t a romantic comedy — it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her… right?”

“… right?”, as they say, is doing a lot of work here. The entire plot of Romantic Comedy hinges on Sally’s supposedly unshakeable belief in her own unworthiness, which makes it very now; the insecure, self-sabotaging heroine is to the 2023 romance what the adorably clumsy girl was to the rom-coms of the Nineties. But what’s more remarkable about the novel is how it straddles two different worlds, and worldviews, when it comes to love: here we have the age-old yearning for a happy ending, right alongside the current vogue for being ashamed of wanting one. Sittenfeld somehow captures not just the current state of the romantic comedy, but of heterosexual romance more broadly — and in doing so, reveals that there is nothing funny about it.

It has been a quarter of a century since a girl stood in front of a boy and asked for him to love her, and 35 years since Harry met Sally. Now, we have Sittenfeld’s Sally, glumly deciding not to break off her tepid occasional relationship with a guy she met online, because “doing so would result in my needing to find another sexual outlet, meaning I’d have to resubscribe to a hookup app and meet enough strangers at enough bars to determine which one probably wouldn’t kill me if we went back to my apartment”.

More from this author

The death of intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

Sally inhabits the same world, and worldview, as Sittenfeld’s professional, liberal, millennial target reader; their anxieties and preoccupations are also hers, as is their unifying conviction that men will inevitably disappoint you. It is only a matter of when and how. The outing of bad men has come to function as a sort of single woman’s spectator sport, as if the inevitable unmasking of a boyfriend as a liar, a cheater, a serial killer, or (worst of all) a Republican is not just fun in its own right but actually the whole point.

It’s not difficult to tease out the contributing factors that led us here. The highly individualised notion that relationships should be first and foremost about self-fulfilment. The devaluation of loyalty and companionship. A therapised culture that treats the process of falling in love and establishing intimacy as something sinister and pathological. And of course, the pervasive (and not incorrect) sense that someone new is only ever a Tinder swipe away. It’s not a coincidence, in this cynical moment, that our most viral relationship stories are not about falling in love, but breaking up, giving rise to a genre of personal essay that is ostensibly about female empowerment but works much more like something akin to revenge porn.

To air your ex’s dirty laundry in the pages of a national publication is increasingly presented as a radical act of self-care, sisterhood, even social justice. As one refreshingly critical response put it: “Do this and you will be met with a huge wave of sympathy from strangers on the internet. They will applaud you as a brave truth teller, commendably taking a strike for women everywhere, against the common enemy.”

The ex-boyfriends in these essays are liars, cheaters, hypocrites. They are threatened and resentful when a woman succeeds. They are sexually entitled and emotionally withholding. But most of all, they are ordinary. It is understood that what they did to their long-suffering girlfriends is simply what men do to women — or, more to the point, what they make women do to themselves. “The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill. Most women I know do it regularly,” wrote one such author in the Guardian. “They bend until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.”

Suggested reading

Do men love bitches?

By Louise Perry

Sally’s failed starter marriage (already over by the time the book begins) could be ripped from one of the aforementioned viral essays: when she flies to New York for her Night Owls interview and gets offered the gig on the spot, her husband, a lawyer, not only assumes she’ll decline, but confesses that he only indulged her repeatedly auditioning for the job because he assumed she’d never get it. Sally, of course, cites this as evidence that her ex “didn’t think I was funny or talented” — as opposed to, say, an awareness of the statistical likelihood of a non-industry professional becoming a literal overnight success in the most elite comedy writers’ room in the country. This penchant for taking things personally rears its head in her new relationship, too: “If I were a hot twenty-five-year-old actress, would you have dropped my hand like that?” she snipes at Noah, after the two are ambushed by paparazzi.

Sittenfeld, surely, could not have imagined how perfectly this book would slot into our current cultural obsession with the shortcomings of heterosexual men. A dim view of romance, of men, and of the women who want them, is ubiquitous enough that it permeates the New York Times review of Romantic Comedy, in which writer Scaachi Koul scathingly describes Sally’s pop star suitor as “a manic pixie dream boy for straight white women of a certain age”. (As opposed to the manic pixie dream girl who populated the turn-of-the-century rom-com.) These men, it’s understood, do not exist in real life.

And yet, a recent, much-discussed break-up piece by poet Maggie Smith gave rise to the fascinating spectacle of, well, straight white men of a certain age, violently competing for the role of real life manic pixie dream boy. “Can you imagine being partnered with a writer as successful as Maggie Smith — MAGGIE SMITH — and you’re pissed off that she’s not doing the dishes enough or isn’t folding the laundry or running the vacuum or doing bath time as much as you are sometimes,” read one representative thread — from a man whose Bumble profile almost certainly includes a photograph of himself in a This Is What a Feminist Looks Like T-shirt. “[Come] on man your partner is living the dream, and even if she toiled in obscurity, fuck, support her with your every effort.”

What are we to make of the notion that even in this hypothetical paradise of gender equity, a woman is not respected for her status as an equal contributor to the household, but rather indulged, on the basis of her sex, in a way that we categorically do not associate with adults?

Suggested reading

Hag feminism is the future

By Phoebe Maltz Boy

We can only look back with chagrin, much like the protagonist of one of those Nineties movies. But the sad-verging-on-nonexistent state of the rom-com in 2023 surely stems, at least in part, from the conflicted relationship we have with the love stories we tell inside the confines of our own heads. A book like Romantic Comedy is the product of a world full of generalised complaints about the glut of exceptional women for whom no man can possibly be good enough: these are not stories about men, but about women, and how we wish to see ourselves in the narrative of our own lives. If the novel is a mirror for young women’s anxieties, it’s not an ordinary one, but more like one of those fairy-tale looking glasses that is more likely to tell you flattering lies than the truth.

Of course, we already have love stories about people (men, usually) whose desire for someone (not always a woman) is inextricably intertwined with shame and contempt: Pretty Woman, Brokeback Mountain, Ever After. The idea that the shame and contempt is valid, though, or that the person who feels it can be the hero without ever confronting her hubris: that’s new. When we start out ashamed of who and what we want — and what we want is an entire category of person pre-labelled as “trash” — what kind of stories do we tell to justify wanting it anyway? To get it without loosening our grip on our sense of superiority?

The answer, at least sometimes, seems to be that we retreat into helplessness. Women relinquish their agency in favour of vague mumblings about how we can hardly be blamed for our poor romantic outcomes. As in Romantic Comedy, this defeatism sometimes masks itself as vulnerability. It’s not, though. Sally doesn’t believe she’s unworthy of love. It’s more cynical than that. She just doesn’t really believe in love, full stop. What with all this male power, privilege, and patriarchy swirling like a miasma over our lives, there’s no hope of it. And if the old avatar for romantic regret was Joan Jett snarling, “I hate myself for loving you,” our new one looks more like Taylor Swift moaning, “Look what you made me do” — as she carefully, deliberately shreds the reputation of every man who broke her heart.

Even if you don’t know her name, you’ve probably seen her movies; and even if you haven’t seen her movies, you know about that bit of When Harry Met Sally. And even if you absolutely insist that you live in a state of perfect Ephron-innocence, the incredible pervasiveness of her work means she’s still the author and the architect of a large chunk of the way we all think about women and men and love. Her sensibility is the sensibility of the modern romcom. It feeds into most of the sitcoms that have been filmed in New York since 1989: Friends and Seinfeld and 30 Rock.

When someone’s influence is so strong, their originality can be obscured. The three films Ephron made starring Meg Ryan between 1989 and 1998 — When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail match screwball sensibility with a dash of therapised insight, and always a happy ending (“I insist on happy endings,” wrote Ephron in her 1983 novel Heartburn). There’s the meet-cute, followed by a flurry of very funny adversity between Meg Ryan’s character and the male lead. Finally, love wins.

If it sounds cliched now, it’s only fair to acknowledge that Ephron was rewriting the rules at the time. The release of When Harry Met Sally coincided with what Susan Faludi considered the height of the anti-feminist backlash in cinema, when movies offered “morality tales in which the ‘good mother’ wins and the independent woman gets punished”, and told women that they were “unhappy because they were too free”. The same year When Harry Met Sally came out, Disney released The Little Mermaid, and I watched and rewatched Ariel on VHS, learning the songs and learning the message that a handsome prince is worth giving up your family, your home and even your voice for.

When Harry Met Sally has none of that. Sally has a job, just like Harry has a job, and you see exactly the same amount of each of them at work. There’s not even a hint that Sally needs to be broken in and saved from her own unseemly ambition. Sally has friends, and Harry has friends, and they both complain to their friends about the opposite sex — which means that the film fails the Bechdel test, but it also fails the anti-Bechdel test, so it all evens out. It’s equality, of a kind.

It’s certainly not a morality tale. Sally’s best friend Marie (played by Carrie Fisher) starts the movie as the mistress of a never-seen married man: the running joke is that every conversation concludes with her saying “he’ll never leave her”. And is Marie punished for this assault on the institution of monogamy? Is she perhaps drowned in the bath and then shot in the chest by the wronged wife, Fatal Attraction-style?

No, she is not. Instead Marie meets and marries a perfectly nice man, and they’re very happy together. When Harry Met Sally’s diner scene giddily busted the omertà around men’s sexual incompetence and the way women cosset men’s egos; but on my last watch, the cool refusal of judgement towards the adulteress struck me as equally feminist in a quiet way.

More from this author

Why feminists should do the dusting

By Sarah Ditum

But I’m watching as an Ephron fan. Not everybody was: in the less sympathetic reviews of her movies, which were often written by men, words like “saccharine” and “whimsy” were used. The spectre of the “soccer mom” was invoked damningly to represent the audience for these films because, ugh, what could be more repellent than something women like — and not even hot young women you might want to date, but the middle-aged kind who already have kids? Disgusting.

As angry as I am about the sexism here, it ought to be noted that Ephron was deeply sanguine about people who didn’t get her. “Very few people end up knowing who you are” wasn’t a complaint, it was an observation. She went on: “I just mean that most people are misunderstood in some way… But I don’t really think about it a whole lot. And if I do think about it, I think I must do something to make them misunderstand me. But, what’s for dinner?”

There’s something arguably bleak about what Ephron says here, her insistence on piling responsibility on herself. But there’s also something freeing about deciding not to be at the mercy of other people: if she wanted to change, perhaps she could, but she’d rather think about dinner. And it’s possible that she didn’t seek total understanding: she disclosed a lot in her writing (the mess of her marriages, her dislike of her small breasts, her anxiety about ageing), but she did it on her own terms. When she received her terminal cancer diagnosis, she kept that to herself.

Suggested reading

Do boobs have to be political?

By Kat Rosenfield

What can one do about other people anyway, besides carry on despite them? It was an attitude that served her well as woman in male-dominated businesses — first journalism, then filmmaking. Regardless of the unfairness, you simply had to work ferociously and be very good. In her very last interview, given in 2011, she said: “It’s a weird thing because it’s a fact, and yet you have to behave as if it’s not a fact. Here’s the given: It’s really hard for women.” And what made it hard wasn’t just the men, but the women too.

In the 1960s, when Ephron started her career as a journalist, forward-thinking publications accepted that a woman could be a writer; what many struggled with was the idea that more than one woman could be a writer. In a generously critical piece about Dorothy Parker from 1973 — generous towards the woman, critical about the self-pickling one-of-the-guys myth — Ephron wrote: “One no longer wants to be the only woman at the table.” But when the men refused to budge up, regardless of what you wanted, the women were left scrapping over that single spot.

Ephron knew the strength of sisterhood, as in the Sally-Marie kind, without naively expecting it to be women’s default state. Marie is, after all, hurting another woman by having her affair, and Ephron knew perfectly well the pain of being the betrayed party: Heartburn is a lightly fictionalised account of finding herself in that position when she was married to Carl Bernstein. Ephron’s feminism starts from the understanding that women are individuals, with their own baggage, their own interests.

This would have made her a brilliant commentator on today’s feminist splits over gender identity, prostitution and sex. She firmly denied being in the radical camp of feminism, although her scathing assessment of Jan Morris’s transition memoir Conundrum would have her labelled as one now (it’s fair to say that Ephron did not think trans women are women, and she was fortunate in a way to die before that could be held against her). But I think she would have been quick to grasp that many of these splits spring from women fighting proxy wars — for seniority over each other, for the approval of men.

More from this author

Confessions of a female journalist

By Sarah Ditum

She urged younger women to use the freedoms that had been won for them. “I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there,” she said when she gave the 1996 commencement address to all-female college Wellesley. “And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.” It’s stirring stuff, and pay attention to the order: doing something for women as a whole is the highest ambition, but it comes last. First, make your own trouble. A man would.

Maybe it seems impossible to reconcile Nora Ephron, romcom queen, with the rabble-rouser of the commencement address. Does any genre seem less likely to be disruptive than the one that moves, with the elegant logic of a snare, to the moment the two leads are yoked together in heterosexual happiness? But think of it this way: the Ephron romcom isn’t propaganda for love, it’s propaganda for women wanting. Food is an Ephron obsession (Heartburn’s main character Rachel is a cookery writer), and appetite is the ruling principle.

“In case you are wondering, of course you can have it all,” she told the Wellesley students. “What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess.” It’s a prospect that’s as intimidating as it is inspiring, but why shouldn’t you do everything? She did. No wonder those male reviewers worried that soccer moms would catch seditious ideas about, for example, wanting to love and be loved, and to have good sex where they didn’t have to fake it, and enjoy an interesting professional life as well. I don’t think Nora Ephron expected to be understood by the boys. I think she was too busy making trouble to care about that.