The Unspoken Part of the Dating Discourse (by Aimée Lutkin)

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By Aimée Lutkin

There are certain subjects that will always be fodder for the cursed concept of “discourse,” topics that would spawn heated arguments even before a person could announce their opinion simultaneously to hundreds of thousands of strangers on the internet. They have their moments of particularly incendiary heat, of course, then recede, then come back, like wildfire season. Dating is back as the topic du jour, if it ever really left.

Likely, I am biased in thinking romantic love is the defining question of our time. The algorithm has correctly identified me as a single woman and more specifically, a single woman who has written a lot about singleness, dating, and loneliness. So I am served all the videos and Twitter threads and TikTok convos about Modern Love and what it looks like right now. It looks bad. Real bad. It genuinely seems like women in particular are this damn close to unionizing.

The discussion is particularly heated now, but in every era, love is something people will almost always have an opinion about, because they’ve experienced it or because they haven’t gotten to experience it or because they’ve been hurt by it. But most of all, they have opinions because romantic love as a concept is so deeply entwined with how our society is systematically organized that dating seems to be at the heart of their very survival.

Taxes, hospital visits, home care, child custody, bills, pensions, retirement, housing. All of these issues are touched by romantic relationships and often even dictated by whether or not you have one. Yet, many of these love, marriage, and family conversations are about the personal, eschewing the structural.

As an example, we talk about how moms feel abandoned by their childless friends, and how childless women feel like they’re not validated by their friends with kids. That could be a conversation about universal childcare or even universal healthcare if we’re talking about fertility or hospital bills around birthing. It could be about how when we aren’t supported by society it’s much harder to be supportive of each other.