Nora Yoon ’27 is a chemistry major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, The Gallery and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them. They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, songs and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Pema Chödrön, the Buddhist nun, wrote that “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” While this is a pretty extreme example to apply to modern dating, I think it’s valuable advice. Even the cliche of a “movie love story” has become cliche, and what are we left with as a generation to define love with? The only thing really mysterious enough we feel safe to call love are situations that are the ones that we understand the least. “Down so bad I prayed to God about him” reads one tweet. Other people on the internet describe intense, soul bond type connections that were never even explicitly romantic. People are no doubt experiencing love (and writing beautiful poems and songs about it), but why is there such a cultural draw to loving someone who you are not in a relationship with? What is up with the situationship?
I think for many people, the only way for love to be both an escapist fantasy and everyday reality is to project impossible standards of beauty onto someone who they know, ultimately, they are not supposed to be with. Tying one’s wildest fantasies to someone who does not exist has a kind of safety to it. As much as love stories in the past presented an escape from the material ugliness of ourselves and our lives, a situationship presents a contemporary solution to being hyper-exposed to relationships beginning and ending, and beginning and ending. Rather than risk and invest in someone who you know to be flawed, even the people who are more ready to commit, who condemn others for having “commitment issues,” avoid the responsibility and deep necessity of love by dispensing it onto people who will probably reject it.
“Love needs reality” — thus wrote philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. In our world of overwhelming tragic and astonishing news, packaged frozen meals, post-industrial, postmodern deconstructivist nonsense world, there is a sort of disgust with the world that we feel a deep need to escape: isolation, loneliness, lack of purpose. Human connection shows us the possibilities of our lives, that we are able to feel (as when we are in love) overwhelming joy at being alive, an astonishing hope and promise of fulfillment. But it is an error to actually believe that a single person, just because they are an object of affection, will give this quality to our lives. Romance is an addicting drug, and ambiguity opens the door to let us romanticize situations until we get silly with hope and warmth.
The alternative to an intense and overly-serious situationship might be using dating apps with a secret hope of finding someone whom you connect viscerally with, or just to gain the experience of hooking up with someone. Swiping along people who are attractive enough who might find you attractive enough. But I think this too gets to be depressing and isolating. Even when you match with someone you thought was attractive, it rarely leads to fulfilling or sustaining connections. I think dating apps, especially for college-age people, are a desperate substitute for the real stakes and pain of human relationships. But I think that’s part of the apps’ value: deeply unsatisfying experiences don’t leave you with the desire to pursue them again. They simply become a failed experiment, something you mature past. You learn that pressing your lips against the lips of someone whom you find physically attractive does not constitute love, and does not lessen existential dread.
To quote one last serious text, Nietzsche in his philosophical narrative Thus Spoke Zarathustra wrote that “What is perfect teaches hope.” Our lives are incredibly rich, fascinating experiences, and being in love — with the idea of someone, with someone, whatever you want to call it — is a valuable part of the whole experience. But so is disillusionment with romanticism. Real love and fulfilling relationships come with commitment and directness, a spirit of honesty that is fundamentally lacking in situationships or in the way most people use dating apps. But instead of blaming the other people within their situationships or on their dating apps, people seem to forget that you can just stop participating. Be interested in the other people in your life, the reality of love between friends and family, and stop romanticizing: the people you have crushes on will not save your life and give you purpose. That pressure will implode the potential of any romantic connection you might hope to gain.
I don’t think romantic connection is bad, either. I think that people making a shared commitment to live their lives together is beautiful, but I think imagining this with someone who you’re not even dating is setting yourself up for immense disappointment. If you are interested in someone, then tell them directly; ambiguity, the ability to romanticize a connection, is not actually inherent to love, though romantic stories tend to perpetuate this idea. Just talk to people you find attractive, and be interested in who they really are, not who you imagine they could be.
At the beginning of the semester, I told a friend that I had feelings for him, and he was, in the end, extremely fair about it. And while it was disappointing and sort of awkward, I was correct in my intuition that clearing up the ambiguity, preventing a heavy, painful misunderstanding between us would allow something more true and real to grow between us. And I was surprised to find that a lot of the things I adored about him romantically: his intellectual depth, subtle sensitivity and sense of humor, are things that I enjoyed in equal measure with other friends who I am decidedly not attracted to. The hardest thing, whether it’s clearing up an ambiguity or committing to someone who doesn’t live up to your impossible standards, is letting go of the fantasy. The reward is caring about someone real.
