A recent experience with a flaky, unresponsive girl galvanized comedian and actor Aziz Ansari into taking a break from stand-up routines to explore the landscape of modern romance. He, together with a slew of sociologists, designed a series of sociological studies that took them all over the world and deep into the literature of love. The result was Modern Romance, a comprehensive look at changes in the rules and expectations of love and relationships across recent history and culture, as well as the challenges and possibilities currently at play.

Meeting people, dating, marrying: it all sounds pretty standard. But the ways in which we do these things are radically different now than they were even ten or twenty years ago. The notions of “searching” and “the right one” have undergone a dramatic change.

In a series of interviews with senior citizens living in New York’s Lower East Side, more than a third of those interviewed married someone who lived within walking distance of where they grew up. Many were people within the same neighborhood, same street, even the same apartment complex. Many researchers in the 1930s and 1940s also investigated the impact of location on relationships and found similar trends: proximity was a significant factor for couples both in urban and rural settings.

To our modern, twenty-first-century sensibilities, the idea of choosing from pools that small sounds limiting or even frightening. Another feature of marriages fifty or sixty years ago that many now find unfathomable is how early people would get married. Since 1950, the average age for marriage has increased from twenty for women and twenty-three for men to twenty-seven for women and twenty-nine for men. The average age is even higher in big urban areas.

Back in the day, people would finish high school or college, get married soon after, and leave their parents. The classic leave-and-cleave. Today’s typical trajectory is very different. People graduate college, start figuring out a career path, and begin to venture out from under mom and dad’s roof.

Marriage is no longer the main objective. Continuing education, pursuing a career, and casual dating along the way are the norm. Self-actualization and discovery are more important to most people in their twenties and early thirties.

Dating options are no longer limited to the girl next door, either: there are grad programs, places of business, and, perhaps most significantly, the internet.

 The elderly who were interviewed did not have the opportunity to experience what sociologists call “emergent adulthood,” in which young adults enjoy a period of independence before taking the plunge. Many seniors interviewed said they would have liked such a time.

The common reasons for deciding to marry have changed dramatically since the 1950s. The common responses among the elderly were very simple. The women married men who were nice, or made good money. The men married women who were sweet or attractive. 

Today, the common answers are far more intense and effusive and involved. Respondents say things like, “He completes me” or “I couldn’t bear going through life without her.” A recent subreddit thread asked why people think they married the right person. Many of the responses were often gushing professions of love. The stakes seem higher in modern love with the language of completion and unconditional love.

Until 50 years ago, people were content with what sociologists call “companionate marriage,” in which each spouse performs clearly delineated roles, with the husband as the breadwinner and the wife as the homemaker. Head-over-heels infatuation was not what motivated men and women to marry.

The idea that a significant other could bring you happiness, fulfillment, and meaning is fairly new. So is the idea of waiting for the right one. For most of human history, this was a luxury unavailable to most people. Marriage was a much more pragmatic decision, often security-driven. In the past, people would not wait until they were head-over-heels. In many cases, the initial kindling would be fanned into flame over the course of living life together.

By the 1980s, the vast majority of Americans surveyed considered romance a must in a marriage. This sounds great, but romance requires time, toil, emotional investment, pain, stress, and enormous pressure. This is understandable. When two people are trying to get to know each other, they’re trying to figure out whether the other person is perfect while trying to be perfect themselves. The stakes are way higher now that we are hunting for soul mates.

There are pros and cons to this shift. The bright side of holding out for a soul mate is greater opportunity for singles to explore, get a better grasp on who they are, and get to know a greater range of people. Studies have shown that couples that marry young are far more likely to get divorced than couples that marry after twenty-five.

We can filter our searches on dating sites to only show us people with similar interests. Algorithms are becoming increasingly complex. If this is the case, why do so many run into dead-ends and frustration rather than a happy ending? The possibilities that internet and smart phones open up have not made things easier, but more complicated. 

Social media and phones have made meeting people easier, but they have also made cheating a more accessible option. Think about it: your smart phone is a small, portable, password-protected, virtual world that is easy to keep from others—including spouses. You have the privacy and secrecy required to start and continue clandestine relationships.

With so many factors at play in our world, it is hard to come by compelling scientific evidence that the internet has led to more affairs. After all, people have always cheated on each other. It’s a hunch, but it seems a very plausible hunch that the internet has created new avenues for infidelity that would not have been feasible or conceivable without digital media. A slew of anecdotal evidence corroborates this hypothesis, with many people saying that they couldn’t imagine going through with an affair without the technological supports of social media and their smartphone.

In face-to-face interactions, the stakes feel too high. Technology greases the rails.

Cheating incidence in the United States might surprise some. Twenty to forty percent of heterosexual married men admit to having cheated. Among heterosexual married women, the figure is about twenty-five percent. Three percent of men and women surveyed admit to an extramarital affair within the past year.

According to Match.com, three out of four men and women in the United States prefer that their partner come clean about an affair and deal with the repercussions than die with the dirty secret.

People from other cultures don’t get quite as indignant about such things. Less than two-thirds of those surveyed in Spain, Italy, and Germany viewed cheating as immoral. This number is even lower in France: only forty-seven percent of French think cheating is morally wrong. More than half of French men and almost a third of French women admit to having engaged in infidelity. What is more, in focus groups in Paris, many young people did not consider cheating strong enough grounds for the cheated-on to dissolve a marriage, especially if there were kids involved. Some said that they would be angry, but it would not be the end of the world. Being an upstanding guy and having a mistress are not mutually exclusive.

The regions where infidelity was most consistently frowned upon were Latin America, Africa, and Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.

France’s views of infidelity are more cavalier by comparison, and have been for a while. Over a century ago, humorist Mark Twain quipped that what leads to crime in the United States leads to sociability in France. To market Valentine’s day, French floral shops use the common saying, “Don’t forget your mistress!”

In South Asia, where marriages are arranged, the entire matter can start and be settled in as little as a week or two. The swift and simple process is shocking for the soulmate searchers. How could someone make a lifelong decision so quickly and based on so little information?

There is a consumeristic, you-deserve-the-best mentality that has become pervasive in our society. We’re trained to think this way with respect to practically everything—from restaurants to movies to electronics. This thinking has infiltrated our assumptions about romance, especially if we are looking for more than a fling.

While waiting in line at a store or for Netflix to buffer, you could swipe left or right on dozens of potential mates—far more dating options than were available to our parents or grandparents. We now have far more options than ever before in human history.

In theory, options sounds good. Keeping options open is usually considered a shrewd tack. Until recently, the assumption was that more options means more ways to be happy.

One thinker who took exception to this was Hebert Simon, an economist from the 1950s. He posited that while we might like the best, there are too many areas of life to maximize, and so there are many times when we content ourselves with “good enough.” For the things we care about most, we are maximizers; we want the best. But in most realms, we are more easily satisfied. The trouble is that technology allows us to readily maximize an increasing number of realms in which we had formerly been perfectly happy with “good enough.” From tacos to Christmas ornaments, we no longer have to settle for anything but the best.

The obsession with finding the best in every area of life—even the trivial areas—can leave the maximizer in a state of anxiety, because average tacos and tacky ornaments just aren’t going to cut it anymore. By contrast, the ones who are satisfied with “good enough” are not irked by the thought of “this could be better.”

As you can imagine, the ramifications of these changes in the landscape of choice have pretty frightening ramifications for relationships. In a city or on an internet dating service, it is hard not to measure potentials against a glorious amalgamation of all the maximized qualities you fantasize about instead of measuring them against other potentials. To complicate matters, social media, billboards, and commercials reinforce the narrative that that smart, good-looking, talented, Wonder Woman or Superman is out there, just chomping at the bit to shower you with affection and laugh at all your hilarious jokes for the rest of your blissful existence. The steady stream of media keeps us holding on to the ideal instead of recognizing it for what it is: a figment.

In addition to failing to attend to reality, the endless options make us indecisive and anxious. So many times we don’t choose at all. The maximize impulse also makes us more selective and critical. A bad haircut, a grammar mistake in a text, a paisley-patterned shirt—these tertiary matters can become deal-breakers.

This raises the question of whether we’d be happier if we had fewer options, like in small towns and in previous generations. In focus groups in Wichita, Kansas and Monroe, New York, it was found that people tended to be more optimistic about long-term relationship prospects and far more practical about the need to take the bad with the good in a partner. Perhaps there’s a lesson or two that sophisticated urbanites could learn from these small-town realists.

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