‘We want love,’ say young people, but they don’t really mean it. And they’re not entirely wrong

I would have been interested to observe them – these individuals who are now in despair because they cannot find a partner – back in the late nineties in the provinces. I wanted them there, where nothing ever happened and nobody ever turned up, and if you had to replace one nail with another, you already knew it was a lost cause. Love blossomed in a deeply melancholic way through prolonged exposure to that environment. You had to choose: either you fell in love with a schoolmate, a friend’s cousin – in short, someone who was there – or it was all over for you. Often it was all over: if you weren’t content with that, you were left alone. And quite a few of us were left alone.

Just over twenty years on, the world has been turned upside down, so much so that it’s hard to believe. Here in the distant future, we have soulmates everywhere. New dates come thick and fast: this one’s four kilometres away, the other eight; some studied in London, one goes to the mountains, another sails; some read, some write, some just like to mind their own business. ‘The problem of finding someone new’ disappears, replaced by ‘the problem of stopping looking for someone better’. It’s not possible, I tell myself, having gone through a period of romantic drought. It’s not possible to have done such a somersault. It’s enough to drive you mad: people remain alone simply because there’s an abundance of them.

The August issue of The Atlantic runs the headline “The Great Romantic Recession”. Yes, we want love, say young people, but by now nobody can bear the side steps needed to get there. People in their twenties and thirties, in particular, are exhausted. What are these conversations, these phone calls? Just repetitions of the same farce. Our bodies that have to touch. Our obsessions that have to clash. Come on, come on, it’s not worth it. Here’s a list of the reasons for giving up, ranked by how acceptable the whinge is.

1) There’s always someone better. Scientists have conducted experiments on online dating and observed that an excessive number of options leads to more searching, poorer decisions and greater dissatisfaction. Recent studies link the perceived abundance of potential partners to decision overload and a higher likelihood of remaining single. The app’s illusion: carry on, the next one might be better. But this is the market logic of the app: if you carry on, it makes money; if you get married, it’s lost a customer. We’d have to be smarter than capitalism – and humans? As if. In short, you end up feeling disheartened not because you’ve chosen a dud and ended up with them, but because by choosing the dud you’ve missed out on other possibilities (other duds, but you only realise that with maturity). Acceptability rating: 6. It’s the most pious illusion, cultivated even before the internet: overestimating new people. In the end, they’re just old people in disguise.

2) Red flags. Red flags everywhere. Everywhere you look, there are ‘human cases’, narcissists and manipulators. The greatest contemporary misfortune is this psychoanalytic outlet where we’ve all ended up parking ourselves, waiting for who knows what. Perhaps for someone to come along and say: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Degree of acceptability: 2. We are a group of sublime egoists; it is best to resign ourselves to this fact. The truly good, whole person does not exist, or exists only for a finite time. One is generally boundlessly good when one is very happy. So: three-quarters of an hour in a lifetime.

3) The all-too-frequent and intolerable rejection. These days, people pick you up and drop you with remarkable ease. Marriages now seem to last just a semester. In the age of social media, those with broken hearts are expected to cope remarkably well: you’ve got the photos, the videos, and you watch live as your ex’s new romance with their girlfriend begins. It used to take months before you witnessed the final scene; today, you’re immediately bombarded with slideshows of the happy new couple together. It’s too much for one person to bear. Acceptability rating: 10. I understand perfectly. On the other side of Shakespeare’s scales, however, it’s important to remember that this is always true: it’s love when people stay long enough to let you down.

4) The new solitude. Life at home has become wonderful. The cinema from the sofa, the restaurant, the clothes shop and the WhatsApp bar – all at your fingertips. Who we are and where we come from remain up in the air, but the question of where we’re going has its answer: ‘nowhere’. Acceptability rating: 3. I think there’s a specific condition here, one that really ought to be studied: ‘I’m not feeling bad enough here on my own to risk feeling worse out there with someone else’.

5) Expectations. Contemporary mythomania also has its romantic offshoot. The world has become full of people who ask themselves ‘Am I as happy as I can possibly be with this person?’ every 20 minutes and expect ‘yes’ as an answer. Acceptability rating: 0. With modern love, we wait to feel a certain way. Which never comes because it doesn’t exist.