The Imitation of Love

Jul 24

Nobody who uses a dating app is happy with their romantic life.

As someone who swam through the digital sea in a big city, I can say confidently that the swipe economy encouraged me to become the opposite of someone worth sacrificing for. 78% percent of dating app users have experienced relationship burnout, and the ones who stick around are burning nearly an hour a day for a payoff that rarely results in a fulfilling, lasting relationship. Thankfully, Justin McLeod, the founder of Hinge, recently raised eighteen million dollars for his newest venture, Overtone, an AI assisted matchmaking service built to save users from themselves. Though the popular comparison being made at the moment is to the Black Mirror episode "Hang the DJ," I'd argue that Brave New World paints a more accurate picture. If you weren't forced to read it in school, Huxley's citizens are conditioned from infancy with a phrase pumped into their sleeping minds: everyone belongs to everyone else. Because an entire civilization in the novel had to be built before in order to be erased, it's worth exploring what the older definition actually claimed. It predates Huxley by seven hundred years, by way of a proponent of natural theology and the father of a school of thought known as Thomism.

Thomas Aquinas defined love as an act of the will, specifically "to will the good of the other." The tradition he belonged to drew a clear line between love and lust by recognizing that, though bound by desire, the two point toward opposite ends. Love is ordered toward the celestial and eternal, willing both someone's flourishing on earth and their pursuit of the source of all goodness: God. Lust inverts this aim, and draws desire to fulfill the terrestrial and carnal. Speaking to a contemporary audience, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus synthesizes this idea further: "Only when I give up on the search for myself in abandonment to another - to the Other - is my 'I' reconstituted by the 'I' to whom I surrender."

I've spent the last few years meditating on what that actually requires of me. I haven't given up on art entirely but I’ve become far more judicious with the time and money, and attention it requires. Prioritizing my own creative pursuits professionally would mean staying available to an industry I’ve grown misaligned with, oriented around what it wants from me instead of what my family needs. As a newly married man, serving my wife meant finding work I could stand behind with the flexibility of time and locational freedom. Now it means preparing for the child we're expecting instead of prioritizing the next casting call, showing up to a writer’s round, or rushing to meet a last minute deadline. In the small daily crucifixion of my own appetites, I hope to reflect the love of Christ to those around me.

We all recognize that true love requires sacrifice, but the culture's refusal to mirror this model comes at a cost that affects everyone in a profoundly negative way. Classical ethics never treated vice as the simple absence of virtue but as the manifestation of the act turned inward. The 2nd century Roman satirist, Juvenal, considered this sentiment as the “greatest of crimes to prefer survival to honor and, out of love of physical life, to lose the very reason for living.” When comfort becomes the highest good, the same appetite naturally oriented toward another's good is redirected instead toward the good of the self. Lust is what love becomes the moment it stops willing anything beyond its own satisfaction.

Sound familiar?

Some of the most popular entertainment for Americans today is built on the transactional imitation of love. Love Island puts a dozen people in a villa and rewards whoever couples up fastest on the strength of chemistry rather than commitment. The Bachelor stages an entire courtship inside six weeks of curated dates. Too Hot to Handle turns celibacy itself into a game show premise, treating self-restraint like a novelty stunt instead of ordinary discipline. This is Poly exists. None of these shows have to hide what they sell because the culture has fully absorbed a working definition of romance from formats built to maximize screen time.

Gratification has been cloaked in love's dignity without taking on any of its obligations while love has come to mean whatever gratification can deliver. Just as we've grown obsessed with a narrow, empirical science that only trusts what can be measured, our concept of love has shrunk the same way, reduced to whatever the senses can verify and stripped of anything celestial. Mirroring the consumer habits described in The Age of the Comfortable Man, a large share of our culture has either lost the ability to tell the difference between wanting someone and willing their good, or worse, abdicated the will to try.

Like most entertainment apps, dating apps are engineered around carnal appetite rather than self-sacrifice, and plenty of the men frustrated by that system aren't fixing the problem so much as rerouting around it through the use of pornography. Predictably, men that report heavy use also report the highest rates of loneliness and insecurity, and studies tracking couples over time have linked the start of a pornography habit to a meaningfully higher risk of divorce down the line, especially when the habit stays hidden. Digital prostitution networks including OnlyFans remove even the pretense of a relationship and sell the gratification directly to the consumer. From a creator standpoint, under 1% of creators capture the overwhelming majority of the platform's revenue, while the typical profile earns barely enough to cover a car payment. This gap is exactly what management agencies (i.e. digital pimps) seek to close so that the platform and agencies both profit regardless of any negative side effects that befall the human on camera. While men have become synonymous with the term “porn addict,” it is worth mentioning that print sales of romance fiction in the US have doubled in the last five years. Driven largely by BookTok, “spicy” fiction has become aspirational enough that it has been upgraded from a section far removed from children’s material to entrance and checkout displays.

Self-sacrifice only makes sense if there's something beyond the self worth sacrificing for. Once the transcendent good that human flourishing is naturally ordered toward is flattened into momentary physical pleasure, sacrifice becomes a cost with no return. The love modeled by Christ stands opposed to the slop we’ve defaulted to; both human and artificial. Like beauty, love was never meant to be optimized because it was never meant to be commodified. Consumption is frictionless, but so is the emptiness it leaves behind. The small crucifixion is daily, but so is the resurrection that follows.

The Imitation of Love

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The Imitation of Love

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The Reign of the Ledger

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