Love Is Worth Believing In

If you’re going to fall for anything in modern life it should be another person

Screenshot: TikTok, @princesspellow

Something often said about my generation is that we’ve lost hope. We’ve lost belief in the future. We’ve lost belief in ourselves. What’s less talked about, though, is that we’ve lost belief in love. We think romance is dead.

What killed it? Social media, for a start, which promised connection before turning flirting into wuu2 and flame emojis. We can message each other when we’re apart now, great, but some also think texting counts as a date. We can stay connected, cool, but we also turned teenage love into swiping, sending nudes, and tracking Snapchat scores. And whoops, looks like we accidentally taught young people that you find love by advertising yourself like a product, that love is hanging out with someone until they meet someone hotter or better at marketing themselves. Might be why so many of us are anxious, insecure, and giving up. Just a guess.

Then dating apps, which promised to make falling in love faster, easier, more convenient. Maybe it’s cool that we can order food from a million restaurants on Deliveroo now, but “catch feelings for as many people as you want”? Great that Amazon deliveries are quicker, and Spotify finds songs faster, but falling in love? Should that be more efficient? Is there any need to INCREASE YOUR MATCH-MAKING POTENTIAL BY UP TO 25% or SPEED UP THE PROCESS? Not sure that’s how love works. Yes, the internet made things more convenient. But sometimes I think it put everything within my generation’s reach, put the world at our fingertips, while making the only things that really matter, like romantic love, feel utterly unreachable.

And if we weren’t demoralised enough, mainstream media seems to be on a constant crusade against romantic love. We are reminded, relentlessly, that it isn’t real. There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love, According to Science! Romantic love is a dangerous myth, and here’s why we don’t need it. We are helpfully informed that it was invented by Hollywood and Disney and card companies, and be careful, because this creates unrealistic expectations. Stop watching romcoms, they warn us, they’re bad for you, while we watch violent and degrading porn. Stop reading romance novels, they warp your idea of love, while we shop for each other on apps. Thank God they’re warning us of the dark side of believing in true love! Could’ve been dangerous.

What’s realistic, apparently, is arguing all the time. Some cheating, here and there. Utter contempt for your spouse. That’s part of it! It’s funny, actually. Makes for good anniversary cards. It’s normal that the scariest part of lockdown for many people was trying to SURVIVE spending time with the love of their life. Marriage is being annoyed by someone forever. Meanwhile we sneer at men expressing love. We mock love that lasts. If you want that kind of love we smile at you like you’re a naive child. You’re so young; maybe even unwell. Healthy people know romantic love is unrealistic! They’re enough on their own. They love themselves instead.

But here’s the thing: of all my concerns about this generation and love, unrealistic expectations are probably last on the list. The real threat to our love lives isn’t unrealistic expectations; it’s having no expectations at all. Many of us don’t believe romantic love is real. We don’t believe loyalty is real. We seem to think that if we are selfless and surrender to someone we’ll get nothing back, so why bother. As far as I can tell, we have so little faith in love, in loyalty, in anything lasting.

And yet we’re constantly warned that having unrealistic expectations will ruin our hopes of love. But what about having no expectations? What about the bigger danger right now, of not believing in romantic love? Thinking there’s nothing deeper to be found, that nobody is really loyal, that to be treated better is too much to ask for. Thinking that’s all the stuff of romcoms. Our problem isn’t that we overvalue romantic love; we undervalue it. We see love as the end of freedom, not the beginning. And we keep lowering the expectations; love doesn’t have to last anymore, actually it’s healthier if you discuss ducking out before you commit. We’ve lowered them to the point where our most intimate relationships resemble roommates, people we watch Netflix with until we die or someone gets bored and decides to go watch Netflix with someone else. We praise the bare minimum. We forgive serious failings. Much healthier that way!

Of course unrealistic expectations exist. Like expecting that first stage of love to stay the same and giving up the second it changes. But romance? Loyalty, kindness, respect? These are not unrealistic. Neither is expecting love to last; we forget that when the explosion ends, it comes back in bursts, and simmers, quietly on, in the small things. It goes from staying up until 3am talking to reaching out your arm in the night and feeling their warmth. From determined to spend every second together to the joy of just knowing they’re downstairs somewhere. It’s feeling that life is flowing a bit smoother, that music sounds better and the walk looks brighter and you’re softer and more gentle with people, more gentle with yourself. And maybe it’s hard to talk about love like that because it’s quiet. It’s not loud or theatrical like these influencers or TikToks or everything else that screams for our attention. But it’s there, it’s there.

It’s also irrational, falling in love. Hard to explain. Which is why all these checklists and calculations about what men and women want online have never made sense to me. Of all the couples I know who are in love, there’s no explaining it. They didn’t decide. There were no calculations about money, height or age; they threw out their checklists. And we know this, we know love is messy, but that’s scary, so we turn to all these dating gurus giving us graphs and statistics, analysing it all, calling it a market. Guide us toward guarantees! Feed our hunger for control that’s gotten so out of hand we’re now trying to predict the most beautifully unpredictable thing in the world. We’ve gotten so used to algorithms and machines optimising our entire lives we think we can hack something like falling in love—if we just follow the right steps life will deliver the right results. Love is so much more unthinking than that.

Secondly, anyone who has felt real love knows it’s not just about the unpredictability of who you fall for, but that they aren’t replaceable. We talk endlessly now about people being exchanged like products, everyone expendable at any moment. Real love doesn’t work that way. Real love is meeting someone and thinking, okay, I’m in trouble here because it’s this person and this person only. It’s looking at them and thinking God, even if love is doomed to go wrong guess I’m going to have to attempt it now. But this is all just hormones, apparently! Nothing too serious! Something we can feel for multiple people at once! Healthier to see it as temporary. And maybe it is healthier in a way, or at least less terrifying than the truth: that falling for someone means risking a permanent hold on you. That’s the price we pay: a real and irreplaceable connection for the risk of feeling bound to them forever, whatever happens.

And with real love there’s no calculation about what’s in it for you; it’s a sudden, sometimes disorientating urge to give. Not the type of giving we think of. Putting their needs first. That thing we call people-pleasing and a trauma response. That thing we train people to stop doing and send them to therapy for. That beautiful, rare thing. We used to call it love, you know—your needs becoming theirs. Taking care of each other. That’s what love is supposed to be: you fall for someone and it kickstarts some selflessness in you, awakes kindness and generosity you didn’t know you had. Doesn’t matter how resistant or independent you are, it disarms you. Can we even get our heads around that now? We had it hammered in that we are enough, that we have to be strong and self-reliant, that we should never give any of ourselves away. How are we supposed to make sense of becoming one accord?

But I think this kind of love is real, is possible. I think it’s one of the only things left that is. If anything is an illusion, it’s all these other distractions—it’s social media, it’s dating apps, it’s the porn industry pretending it’s healthy and human to sit alone in your room and simulate intimacy with a screen. Honestly is there anything more hopeless? I don’t think the poets are lying to you about love. I do think Tinder is lying to you, and PornHub. I do think our culture is lying to you when it insists self-love is enough, that buying more and chasing fame, followers and freedom is what’s real and reliable. That believing in all that will make you happy but believing in love will get you hurt. I guess I just think if you’re going to fall for anything in modern life it should be another person.

And so I’m becoming sceptical of this idea that those who rush into romantic love are the naive ones. I’m starting to think it’s the ones who wait as long as possible, trying to calculate and predict everything first, making sure it’s maximised in their interest. Those who fall in love and convince themselves it’s a chemical reaction or a trauma response—aren’t they telling themselves a comforting lie? Those lucky enough to experience the most precious and rare thing in life but hedge their bets and hold out to commit. Always half-in, half-out. Who’s naive? Who here is more hopeless?

I’m not denying it’s hard to find love now. But disbelief makes it harder. My advice for girls growing up and becoming disillusioned is basically do the opposite of what we’ve been told. Watch old romantic movies, read classic love stories, play old love songs, listen to your grandparents. Fill your life with reminders of the good in the world. Don’t expect lifelong commitment to be easy, but don’t lose hope in loyalty, in kindness, in lasting love either. Hold those expectations for yourself and others. Conduct yourself as if that kind of love exists, and you’ll come closer to it. Because right now it’s painful—painful trying to keep it together and hold onto hope when this world is hell-bent on killing it. Feel some wonder and get a chemical explanation. Feel some selflessness and get told to put your guard back up. Feel alive for once and get laughed in the face. I suggest you shut all that out. And be brave enough to say no, I don’t want a situationship, I want to know someone; I want to be known. I won’t put up with a love that’s disloyal or unkind or half-hearted, because I believe in something more. I don’t want endless options, the world at my fingertips. I want the world to fall away except for one person.

For anyone older who has found this type of love, please remind young people it’s real. Gen Z might have it easier in many ways but seriously, when it comes to romance we’ve had it rough. The only world we’ve ever known is one where our parents are two strangers who can barely look at each other at the doorstep. Where our partners kindly put their Tinder accounts on pause to try us out. Where porn isn’t stigmatised but supposedly benefits our relationships. So please, don’t call young people naive when against all odds, against every cultural disincentive, against constant messaging to maximise their freedom, they decide to commit to one person. Don’t wonder why nobody wants to settle down while making marriage sound like a living hell. Because we have to believe in love, first. You can’t fall for anything you don’t believe in. We’re demoralised and risk-averse enough. We don’t need any more warnings.

But yeah, I’m young. Maybe the joke’s on me. Hopeless romantic and everything. But I don’t know, seems to me that the romantics are the only ones left with any hope; everyone else has had it hollowed out of them. If anything’s hopeless it’s a world convinced that love is a chemical impulse or calculation. It’s a young generation that instead of going after giddy teenage love is already giving up on it. It’s this vain belief that we can game love, game death, game nature, game this whole world to avoid hurt and pain. God help us. Hopeless.

All this to say, I think love is real. I think it’s worth believing in. We can’t afford not to. There are a lot of ways we are fooled in the modern world, but falling in love isn’t one of them. Loyal, selfless, lasting love is out there. Remind yourself of that often. Refuse to give up on it. Otherwise our world belongs to the people who don’t believe. Otherwise we hand it over to the truly hopeless. I think we’re already finding out what happens then.