Future of love: At the dangerous intersection of longing, loneliness, politics and technology

“Falling in love is a crazy thing to do. It’s kind of like a form of socially acceptable insanity.”

Amy Adams tells her lonely and introverted friend Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) in the 2013 movie, Her. But as he goes through his divorce with his childhood sweetheart, Theodore gradually wakes to an even more insane love…with his newly acquired AI-driven operating system, Samantha.

It is not just that film. A steady string of blips on the popular culture monitor — from movies like Newness to OTT series like Westworld and Black Mirror to dating app trends — are telling us that love and longing have taken a turn into the thickets of the unknown. Humankind’s story of intimacy is at the intersection of chaotic desire, endemic loneliness, vicious identity politics, and coldly invasive technology.

A blind date with a stranger can be enthralling, like in Before Sunrise. It could also be eviscerating, sometimes literally, as Shraddha Walker was to find out after meeting Aftab Amin Poonawala through the Bumble dating app. Trapped in a crumbling family and a call centre job, a lonely and desperate Shraddha had hooked up with Aftab online.

Let us first talk about desire, which some streams of philosophy argue is older than and perhaps the metaphysical womb of creation itself. It has always existed, and will exist. But as desire gets liberated from rigidly defined social structures of the past, it becomes progressively difficult to draw thick, red lines around it.

Men and women no longer meet solely within domestic walls or in carefully curated situations. They meet every minute, everywhere… in the anonymity of a crowded office place or in the privacy of direct messages on social media.

The ‘forbidden’ exists only on browning, brittle paper. What stops us from connecting with a married colleague, a friend’s fiancé, a same-sex stranger at a protest march, or an interesting food blogger on social media? Where there is the potent pull of consent, how long can the frayed tethers of conventional morality hold? Not too long, clearly.

But if there is so much multi-directional scope for romantic connection, why are people so lonely?

Why are they constantly fiddling with their cold devices instead of being in the warm company of those they love?

Why are those pretty and lonesome food photos on their Instagram feed instead of an immersed dinner with someone which leaves no time for anything else?

The Social Statistic Division of National Statistical Office (NSO) recently released an interesting report on unmarried people in India.

Among other things, it noted a sharp fall in the number of youths who want to get married. The percentage of the young men (15-29 years) who ‘never married’ has gone up from 20.8% in 2011 to 26.1% in 2019, a 5.3 per cent rise. The jump in the number of unmarried young women has been even more dramatic: from 13.5 per cent in 2011 to 19.9% in 2022. That is a 6.4 per cent increase.

The data reflect large swathes of rural India as well. One reckons that a survey of urban, upwardly mobile urban youth will throw up startling numbers.

In Indian cities, divorces have gone up by 50-60 per cent, lawyers have told the media.

The sudden explosion of options to mingle seems to be ironically leaving people unsure and most often unsatisfied with what they pick. The modern man or woman with an abundance of choice either constantly feels that they could do better, or finds that the most suitable person they have met is not in a situation to have a conventional, long-term relationship with.

To top it are the new, watertight and savagely contested compartments of identity. Is the person showing interest in me a ‘woke’, ‘liberandu’, ‘sickular’, ‘bhakt’ or ‘Sanghi’? Is he or she he/him or she/her or they/them? Are they cis, trans, non-binary, heteronormative, birthing, pansexual, or somebody else in some corner of the ever-expanding gender map?

Is that person a dog lover or vegan?

Is he, she or they sensitive to mental health, environment, minorities, subaltern identities, black, brown, yellow?

Because apparently we can no longer be a species that tolerates, leave aside enjoys, the company of those who live outside our own tiny, paranoid bubble.

Identity can also be a very handy camouflage to get laid or keep a relationship. Aftab used to regularly post his solidarity with LGBT+ rights, feminist activism, and environmental causes before buying a large fridge to keep 35 parts of his girlfriend’s chopped body. His political correctness was rewarded with a steady stream of females swiping for him on Bumble.

But the most immense and insidious enabler of this madness has been technology. Social media has made sure that what took months of wait and awkward meetings is now achieved with an effervescent memoji or a bold swipe.

So many millions of packets of information daily can be disconcerting for even the finest human mind. Daylong exposure to fleeting reels of romance advertising perfection slowly makes us inure to the charms of imperfection. Gigabytes of pornography make us forget lovemaking and instead aspire for some aloof, acrobatic ideal.

Overexposure to digital porn has started affecting lives in such real ways that it triggered a non-religious, somewhat clumsy backlash called the NoFap Movement. Proponents, mostly youngsters, claimed that relentless masturbation has left their lives hollow, their relationships void, and their mental health poorer.

An episode in Black Mirror, ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, depicts a futuristic world where loneliness, gaming, technology, longing, and pornography melt into a deeply painful concoction.

Online dating through AI-fired apps can take the quest for a relationship to the level of gaming. It is exciting. You push boundaries seeking to increase that excitement. It keeps shortening your patience for any awkwardness, stillness, or stagnancy.

And out comes terms like ‘catfish’, or someone who projects a certain image but when you meet them in person, they may look very different, and even be of an entirely different gender, age, or profession. Tinder, many complain, teems with catfish these days.

Or take ‘winter coating’. Dating app Inner Circle said 52% of 1,150 UK singles recently said they have been approached by an ex who wanted to try again, with 71% saying it didn’t work out. ‘Cuffing season’, for instance, are short-term relationships for the winter months. Spring, instead of regenerating, apparently withers these hook-ups.

A particular favourite with narcissists is apparently ‘doppelbanging’, or sleeping with somebody one looks like. It sounds implausible, but one cannot deny that there are far more magical creatures in the digital menagerie.

The future of relationships is hard to predict. The modern human is discovering that love may not be the ‘happily ever after’ that we were promised. The lack of opportunity that so far stood between the monogamous and polyamorous is fast disappearing.

But it can be extremely painful to reconcile with the fact that magnificent short bursts of romance cannot be poured into neat, old containers of the past. Structures like marriages or even lifelong live-ins are in existential crisis.

It is a terrible dilemma. If love is infinite, why can’t relationships be forever? Why should they be fated to be solely short-term?

Perhaps traditional contracts like marriage, with its agricultural and industrial preconditions, will give way to newer, more flexible arrangements that rekindle long and fulfilling relationships. Perhaps humans will see through the cunning of technology using us rather than us using technology.

Whichever direction it takes, the journey of human intimacy in the next four or five decades may decide the course of human history for centuries to come.

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