Hinge is not to blame. We are, with all the impossible ideals we hold on to.
María Camila Dávila (she/her) // Crew Writer
Alex Baidanuta (she/her) // Crew Illustrator
Who doesn’t want to be in love? Maybe we are not going to say it out loud, but we have all dreamed of being Allie or Noah from The Notebook. Precisely, we wanted to be in that scene in the movie when they kiss under the pouring rain. Oh boy, how much we wanted to have an extremely romantic love story!
However, instead of a fairy tale, as soon as we grow up we face a rude awakening. The reality may be that we realize our parents aren’t as in love as we thought they were. Or rather than a perfect meet-cute, we are scrolling through Hinge and Tinder at 11 p.m. Love, then, ends up being a strange and distant feeling; something we want so much but we don’t know how to get.
We were raised with the idea of a one true love that lasts for eternity: “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.” We grow up in a culture of monogamy, where all the weight of our emotional needs lies on one single person, and where we all have assigned roles to fulfill, according to labels and gendered responsibilities.
Usually men are expected to fulfill certain stereotypes as the provider, who is strong, unbreakable and emotionally unavailable. Women, on the other hand, are expected to adhere to traditional notions of femininity as the stay-at-home and obedient wife and the nurturing mother. When we realize that the story we believed in was nothing more than a fantasy and that the roles we imagined ourselves fulfilling were impossible to live up to, we become conflicted.
The problem here is not love per se. Actually, love is one of the few things in this life that feels undeniably real. The problem lies in the idealization we hold about love and relationships.
The Belgian psychotherapist, Esthel Perel, has dedicated her career to human relationships. In 2006, she released one of her most popular works: Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. “To write about relationships,” explains Perel in the book, “one must acknowledge that there are multiple perspectives, cultural contexts, and moments—big and small—that harken back to wounds and messages from other eras.”
A couple of years ago, I went to my therapy session with my heart broken. “Things didn’t work out. She cheated on me with a friend,” I told her. It was our fault. We didn’t respect each other as partners because we weren’t the right match and it wasn’t the right moment. “You are sharing some very disturbing news with me, but I think you feel relieved,” said my therapist.
We spent the next 35 minutes talking about all the external circumstances that made the relationship seemingly unviable, including immigration, complicated relationships with our parents, social insecurities and internalized homophobia. In the end, it didn’t matter how romantic our first encounter was or how compatible we were because romance is not enough to cover up the scars inside us. There isn’t enough space on Hinge to write about all the things we carry with us.
We grow up with the idea that we have an “other half.” This is imposed by the media, passed down with tales from our friends, family and our communities. This is an extremely dangerous narrative because it implies that we are incomplete and cannot feel fulfilled without our “better half.” This idea particularly affects women because it reinforces the belief that a woman’s purpose is to get married and have children, and that her value depends on her ability to achieve these goals.
It feeds off the idea that women need to bend and transform to fit what’s expected of them and are not enough on their own. If she doesn’t follow through, she may be portrayed as a failure, and as though she is not good enough. Ultimately, even if we are not aware of it, this narrative plays a role in shaping young women’s desire to date. The idea of a “better half” is harmful not only because it suggests that we are missing something, but also because it places an enormous amount of responsibility on our future partners to make us feel complete.
“Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity [. . .] Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?” writes Perel. This invites reflection on the weight we are putting on our romantic relationships, and the lack of importance we give to every other kind of relationship that we might have. Perhaps, if we stop idealizing the way that a partner should be, if we forget about the roles and the expectations, our emotional needs would be covered in a more reliable and realistic way.
I truly believe that, eventually, we will all find love. However, we need to be willing to let go of our idealized expectations of relationships. We need to be open to rethinking how relationships work and what works best for us as individuals. The relationship models we’ve grown up with are also something we need to question and deconstruct. We need to know that a relationship is not inherently more valuable simply because it follows traditional standards. The value lies in recognizing that love is not static, and neither are relationships. And that’s more than okay.
If we insist on replicating standards, such as monogamy, that have never been attainable in the first place, we won’t allow things to grow, let alone move forward. As Esther Perel says, “Any person or system exposed to ceaseless novelty and change risks falling into chaos; but one that is too rigid or static ceases to grow and eventually dies.”