Ghosting, benching, breadcrumbing and new, fashionable terms related to modern dating have been multiplying rapidly. Currently, every social media platform overflows with publications focused purely on love and how to interpret it. Although these terms are relatively recent, obsessing over love is certainly not a new phenomenon: the first love poem, The Love Song of Shu-Sin, was written in 2000 BCE, and we can only speculate how the topic of romance had been portrayed in oral traditions before then. In the 19th century, the situation wasn’t different: Werther’s unrequited love had caused suicides in the former century, Jane Austen was offering a new perspective on courtship and social norms while Lord Byron unveiled the adventures of Don Juan.
Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of metaphysics and prominent pessimist, undertook the task of examining this passionate love himself. The fruit of his efforts, The Metaphysics of Love, was eventually published in 1844; and the second half of the 19th century would prove to be much more fruitful, with the Bronte sisters offering feminine perspectives, queer-themed works of Camilla and Dorian Gray emerging and Anna Karenina portraying forbidden love. Schopenhauer observed how love was the “leading idea of every dramatic work, be it tragic or comic, romantic or classic”; it was occupying every individual’s mind not unlike today, particularly the younger generations’. For no matter what, he further added, love is not imaginary and is deeply tied to truth: this is why poets are religiously devoting themselves to the subject, because anything involving beauty such as love cannot exist unless it can be found in nature. In everyday life, it leads people mad, derails them, causes them to act beyond reason, extinguishes their desires and reshapes them into new ones.
Nonetheless, Schopenhauer argues, love is not as grand, passionate nor irrational as it may appear. Yes, it may corrupt intelligent minds, cause star-crossed couples to commit double suicides and even lead great nations to all-annihilating war as immortalized in the Iliad, yet in the end, it simply serves one ultimate purpose: the preserving of the future generations. After all, he writes, “every kind of love, however ethereal it may seem to be, springs entirely from the instinct of sex; indeed, it is absolutely this instinct, only in a more definite, specialised, and perhaps, strictly speaking, more individualised form.” This instinct is the will of a future individual, the unborn child, who is to be conceived. Nature tricks individuals into thinking their wills are leading them towards their lover when in reality, it is not an individualistic matter but concerns humanity as a whole. Schopenhauer defines this as Nature’s illusion: “by which something which is in reality advantageous to the species alone seems to be advantageous to himself [the individual]; consequently he serves the latter while he imagines he is serving himself.”
The philosopher further focuses on heterosexual attraction to determine what causes two people to succumb to nature’s cunning. The infant, he argues, will bear the father’s strength of will and disposition, and the mother’s intelligence with a constitution of both. The will of the unborn arises from the moment when love begins to bloom, and the baby itself is a Platonic idea intent on embodiment in the material world. Schopenhauer also holds beauty and physical appearance in high regard, for the species has to be preserved in its most perfect form. This Darwinistic and at times overtly ableist view focuses on age and health in addition to beauty. He describes chronic illnesses as frightening, and for men the skeleton shall always be a principal element of attraction: “next to old age and disease, nothing disgusts us as much as a deformed shape” in addition to teeth, which are to be checked for proper nourishment. A beautiful face also reflects healthy bone structure.
Women’s preferences naturally differ, he argues, for beauty and intellect are inherited from the mother and thereby the father’s lack of qualities will not affect the future generations at all. The preferred age of men for women is from thirty to thirty five, as the man possesses his peak generative power. Strength and courage are more important than looks as men are seen as providers and protectors. Thus, even an unattractive or unintelligent man may still be deemed desirable if he appears strong and capable of producing healthy offspring. The last thing Schopenhauer considers is that at times, opposites indeed attract: a weaker man may desire a muscular woman, a stupid one a wife full of intellect. This still serves nature’s higher purpose, and such pairings happen to balance deficiencies.
What Schopenhauer saw as a biological illusion has not disappeared at all, and in modernity it has transformed into a digital one in the form of dating apps. In a US-centric report published by Pew Research, 30% of the adult population declared they had used a dating app with 10% claiming they had found their partner online. The first one was founded in 1995: match.com, and from there, as the internet and smart phones became a bigger part of our lives, dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr and Bumble started dominating the dating scene for people of all orientations. Tinder introduced a simple swiping formula: right if you like the looks of someone, and left if they are not your type. This echoes Schopenhauer’s highlight of looks before anything else, and reduces humans to their physical appearances.
Currently, many apps also have numerous filters. You can choose their age (which Schopenhauer would have approved of), location, gender, height, education, drug usage and many others. In the background, all these are ruled by concealed algorithms based on individual feedback and popularity, with some algorithms assigning similarity scores. Nature’s illusion as described by Schopenhauer has finally taken a contemporary form.
Algorithms have become tools to follow Nature’s will, tricking individuals into believing their preferences are shaping their choices when in reality, they lead us to a higher, unseen purpose all the same: to keep us swiping. Thus, they have replaced the will of the unborn explained by Schopenhauer, and instead, have taken the place of it. We swipe believing we are choosing freely, yet our “choices” are almost pre-determined, ranked, and fed back to us. Schopenhauer’s views still echo through our choices and in our usage of dating apps- no longer oriented toward the continuation of the species, but toward the maintenance of being addicted to the algorithm.
