The model Maria Baza wears a Christopher Esber dress, Eres bra, Mulberry bag and Michael Hill necklaces (worn on the assistance's arm). Photographs by Jedd Cooney. I was recently reading “The Children’s Bach”, by Helen Garner, when a sentence stopped me in my tracks. Dexter, a gregarious stick-in-the-mud living in 1980s Melbourne, is talking to another character about relationships. “Love!” he roars. “I’ve never been in love, then. In lerve. I don’t even know what that is.”
There’s a familiar cynicism here: the Australian habit of dismissing anything too sentimental by making it the subject of mockery (“lerve”). But what caught me was the last part: his incomprehension. Dexter is a bit of a fool in “The Children’s Bach” — his wife leaves him for a reason — but he was on to something here. What is love, anyway? And why, as a wise woman once said, does it make us so crazy? (“Looking so crazy, your love’s / Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love.”)
Because I am a writer, my first impulse, after I put down “The Children’s Bach”, was to turn to the dictionary. Merriam-Webster offers nine definitions of love, the first of which is this: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties”. This feels inadequate, to put it mildly, and the other eight definitions are not much better. Love seems to have defeated the editors at Merriam-Webster, but perhaps in the end it defeats us all.
Except William Shakespeare: I turned to him next. The word “love” appears more than two thousand times across his plays and poetry. Surely the high priest of English literature could pin down our elusive target. From “Love’s Labour’s Lost”: “Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible / Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.” Snail horns? This is not exactly what I had in mind. I looked again and found a more promising lead in “Venus and Adonis”: “Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.” Here, I think, is a serviceable definition of love. Everything can be falling apart in life, you can be metaphorically soaked to the bone, shivering and hopeless, but then you see somebody you love and — the sun comes out.
“Venus and Adonis”, which may have been Shakespeare’s very first published poem, appeared in 1593. Here we are, 431 years later, and the fundamental concept of love remains unchanged. What has changed, however, is almost everything else. What we think as a culture about the value of love. What we expect love to do for us on a personal level. How we go about looking for love in the first place. Where we find it.
Ask any couple over the age of 60 how they met and they’ll probably tell a familiar tale. They met via friends, or out at a party, or at a church event, or at work, or — this being Australia — while drinking in a pub. My parents met while my father was on shore leave during his time in the Navy. My mother thought he looked good in his white uniform. But ask the same question of any couple under the age of 40 or so and you might get a very different answer. According to Relationships Australia, almost one in four younger Australians — meaning people under 44 — met their partner online. A Relationship Indicators Report from 2022, based on a national survey, suggests that “friends and family” remains the most common point of romantic connection, but websites and dating apps count for 11.7 per cent. Anecdotally, the number seems even higher to me if I glance around my own life: half of my friends met their significant others through one app or another. My cousin did. And my sister. And me.
It is not hard to understand the appeal of taking the search online. The same Relationship Indicators report found that more than 66 per cent of people thought “compatibility” was the biggest hurdle to love. How to find your person, the one who gets you? Waiting to stumble on a perfect fit at a party or through friends can feel like a fool’s game. Services such as OkCupid, Tinder, eHarmony, Bumble and Hinge promise to take care of the compatibility problem. You make a profile. You create a digital facsimile of yourself. And then the algorithm “matches” you with complements based on interests and preferences. Instead of waiting to randomly stumble on a perfect fit as you walk down the street, they are served up to you like fast food. Or so the promise goes. Anybody who has ever actually used one of these services knows that most of the matches are an immediate swipe to the left. (“No.”) Maths cannot promise love, no matter what the colourful ads say.
I have nothing bad to say about dating apps; without them, I would probably be living alone off-grid in Alaska. But I understand why there is an occasional surge of backlash. At the extreme end, there is the fear that apps advance what The New York Times recently called “technosexuality”, the entwining of our romantic lives with machines. The use of something like OkCupid, the argument goes, is a step towards a world in which everything is filtered through computers.
A world in which Bing’s chatbot can declare love autonomously — as it did not long ago to the journalist Kevin Roose, who was so “unsettled” that he had trouble sleeping afterwards. If we rely on technology to govern our love lives, what’s to stop technology from becoming our love life? Where do we draw a line? Less extreme, perhaps, is the entirely valid concern that online dating involves no small degree of commodification: a messy, fumbling and precious part of being human is reduced to categories for selection or rejection. In becoming a digital facsimile of yourself, you are flattened into a photograph — what you look like, not who you are. Love has always involved a degree of physical attraction, but technology makes appearances the dominant factor.
Recently, I was watching “Love Is Blind” on Netflix. The show is dreadful (I’m addicted), but I found myself wondering if its popularity is a response to the looks-focused dating culture promoted by the internet. Dating apps unavoidably tether the idea of love to what we look like. Here is a reality show that, however ridiculously, severs that tether.
But say you are lucky enough to find love. What comes next has also changed over the past few decades. Here we get into precarious territory, where “love” gets muddled up with “marriage”. But that’s because, for many years, marriage was the conventional outcome. What we expected, to generalise a little (or a lot), was that love would lead to a relationship, which would lead to a secure union. It seems to me this expectation has now been replaced by a slightly different one: that love will lead to happiness. This “happiness” is not synonymous with marriage; indeed, it might look like something else entirely.
Take Taylor Swift, who seems, by almost universal consensus, to be the voice of her generation. Swift has no shortage of love songs in her back catalogue. Does even one mention marriage in any significant way? Her concept of love, shared by many of her fans, has nothing to do with wanting security — she is plenty secure already without the help of a man. As the beneficiary of the women’s liberation movement in the 20th century, Swift sees love as “dancing ’round the kitchen in the refrigerator light”. That sort of spontaneous joy is what she wants. Anything else is extra.
I’ve been amazed by how many of my friends, unshackled from the expectation of a conventional marriage situation, are creating their own expressions of love. I know a woman in Chicago who just had a baby with her boyfriend; they will probably never tie the knot, but they are solid as a rock. I have a novelist friend whose partner lives on a different continent; they have an open relationship where love is reserved for them but sex can be with anyone, of any gender. I have two friends in New York — a gay couple — who were married for years, and then one day they introduced me to their boyfriend. That was six years ago. He now lives with them, shares bank accounts, car ownership and two cats. They visit one another’s parents on alternating holidays as a throuple. Their love is undeniable, and spending time in their company has changed the way I think about love: what I assume it has to look like in others.
A recent study by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University found that one in nine people have been involved in a polyamorous relationship. As the Institute points out, “That’s as common as earning a graduate degree in the United States.”
The rise of polyamory, which literally means “many love”, is almost as striking as the rising rates of divorce. (There were 56,244 divorces in Australia in 2021.) But perhaps they are both symptoms of the same foundational shift. Elizabeth Flock, a journalist who was so interested in modern love that she wrote a whole book about it, “The Heart Is a Shifting Sea”, recently sent me a quote by Ursula K Le Guin: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” In our attempt to make love new, we have made entirely new ways of loving.
Let me tell you a modern love story. I met T on one of the dating apps in 2015. He was handsome and mentioned a book in his profile — literary, I thought, swiping right. He turned up to our first meeting wearing a “Star Wars” T-shirt, which was a questionable choice. Still, the date went well and led to another, then another. After a few months, I went to Berlin for the summer to finish writing a book. He came to visit, we had a good time, and then he went home. I stopped texting from Berlin. I had decided I liked him but didn’t like him. He was not, I thought, a perfect fit.
I had an idea in my head of the person I would end up falling in love with: a tortured, brilliant artist who somehow lived in Paris, New York and Sydney simultaneously. That person was not a realistic one, of course, and in retrospect, if they did exist they would probably be a sociopath.
T was not an artist but an academic. He lived only in New York, and he built “Star Wars” Lego sets in his spare time. He was the human equivalent of a golden retriever. But then we crossed paths again in a bar and I decided it was stupid to keep waiting for an imaginary person when there was a real one standing right there.
We moved in together after three years. We got married after four, at City Hall in New York. My parents watched the ceremony from Queensland via Skype. Our “reception” was pizza and karaoke with friends. In one of our wedding photos, I am pushing his face away, embarrassed by the whole sentimental hullabaloo.
Currently, T lives in Rhode Island and I, for work reasons, live in New York. I see him every other weekend, when I cook him meals to prevent him from wasting away on his default diet of salted popcorn and lentil soup. He is still obsessed with “Star Wars”, much to my horror, with the Lego gradually taking over our apartment.
In February, as I was thinking about what to write in this essay, my next-door neighbour invited me over to make Valentine cards. There was a small crowd of adults sitting around her kitchen table. A man whose wife had recently died of cancer, now making a card for a woman he was cautiously seeing. A young woman whose not-boyfriend refused to define what they were doing every single weekend and most weeknights. A couple who had been childhood sweethearts, still going strong after decades. Everyone was covered in glitter and glue.
I poured a glass of wine and sat down to make a card — something I could never have imagined doing just a few years ago — and ended up drawing R2-D2, the astromech droid, surrounded by stupid red hearts.
“I don’t even know what that is,” Dexter roars about love in “The Children’s Bach”. I guess, for me, that is what love is. Lerve.
