Modern Dating is a Performance Art

Avoidance as Enlightenment, Loneliness as Abundance, and Trauma as Kink

I’m not sure I even want to tell you this, my point of view on the topic that has consumed the generation I don’t want to claim. But I can’t pretend it’s not happening. From my vantage point, straddling the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z, it looks less like progress and more like a generational rupture, one shaped by emotion, ego, and the primacy of wants over earned deservedness.

When I say rupture, I don’t mean the hocus-pocus extremists yelling that we’re headed toward global population decline if we don’t start birthing and fucking like rabbits. But perhaps, on this topic specifically, I am that radical. Or maybe I’ve just matured enough to see the wreckage for what it is.

It starts with one of my friends. She’s heavily involved in this community, on an extreme level, and it disheartens me to have to cut her off mid-story. I understand why she’s seeking it. I don’t have the strength to tell her directly, and she doesn’t read my work (I know, friend). So I’m telling you here, because I need somewhere to say it, even if it’s just you reading this.

I grew up surrounded by love. I knew early that yes, there are ugly marriages, divorce, betrayal, loving another accidentally or purposefully, and falling out of love completely. I was given a wide spectrum of what love can and should look like, and for that, I’m privileged.

But with that understanding, and after witnessing many different narratives both beside and behind me, I must digress: for many, this new trend, this “new wave” of love, is nothing of the sort. It’s hypocrisy disguised as healing, trauma drowned by kink.

We had Archie in the 1940s to even today as CW’s Riverdale, in love with both Betty and Veronica—a charming, fictional dilemma. But by now, we should understand what art and media do: how society slips narratives into culture one character at a time. Today, that fantasy isn’t a punchline; it’s a lifestyle we call enlightened.

My generation is so sexually traumatized that maybe the extremists are right: if we don’t start procreating like monogamous rabbits, we are fucked.

Everyone I’ve come across who’s had a dominatrix in their life (I’m nosy and ask strangers lots of questions) also had a domineering loved one early in life. When those wounds go unhealed, they manifest in our sex lives. It’s obvious to anyone who knows.

Let’s be blunt: it’s all just a fucked-up replay. If you were left, you would now make sure you’re the one who leaves first. If you were controlled, you get on your knees and call it ‘taking control.’ You’re simply re-staging your own trauma, hoping you can change the ending this time.

But this time, the set is different, the costumes are sluttier, and the story always, always ends the same way.

Is this true for everyone who explores a kink or questions a norm? Of course not. Some people approach this with profound self-awareness and communication. I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about the swelling current beneath the trend, the compulsive, unexamined repetition that so many of my peers mistake for liberation.

And it’s not just spanking—though yes, most of us were threatened with it as kids, and now we’re oddly fond of it in bed. The other trend is multiple partners. Calling it “love for many,” calling it “nontraditional,” when in reality it’s more often unhealed abandonment dressed in self-awareness.

But it’s not just kink, it’s the culture of keeping options. Dating has become performance art, and everyone’s afraid of being left without an audience or without love. We glamorize rotation; we make a virtue out of indecision.

In truth, it’s emotional hoarding. Both men and women are building little harems of attention, round tables of affection where everyone loves unconditionally, but only under their conditions. No commitment, no promise, just constant validation on standby.

It’s not freedom; it’s a fear of choosing, it’s the trauma of watching love end so many times that we’d rather never begin. We’ve rebranded avoidance as enlightenment, loneliness as abundance, and detachment as desire.

And I know the rebuttal: This is freedom. This is the liberation from the oppressive, nuclear chains that choked our grandparents. This is claiming desire without shame.

And let me be clear, the right to leave a bad marriage, to build a life outside of rigid, oppressive norms, to have agency over your body? That was a necessary, hard-won war; in some regions, it’s still not over. I am not arguing to crawl back into that cage.

But to that I say, let’s not confuse the dismantling of a cage with the blueprint for a home. You can tear down the prison of traditional marriage and still be left standing in an empty field, calling your loneliness ‘the great wide open.’

Before our parents were our parents, divorce was taboo. But a quick generation later, it all flipped. Society called it progress. But where did that leave the children? Look at the patterns. Multiple partners, polyamory, open marriages, sex parties, “no-shame” kinks; it’s all the by-product of unprocessed grief. And the worst part? It’s leaking. The generation after us, Gen Alpha, are the first children of the emotionally unmoored, and they’re not building something new; they’re building fortresses. We gave them chaos disguised as freedom, and now their rebellion looks like a terrified retreat into rigid roles and digital purity. They saw our round table of lovers and learned that intimacy is a performance for an audience. So they’ve decided to perform alone. It’s not healthy; it’s just a different symptom of the same disease.

And now we have Vogue writing that having a boyfriend is embarrassing. Embarrassing. As if love itself has become cringe. As if loyalty or devotion are outdated aesthetics.

But this is where all of it was heading, wasn’t it? The glamorization of detachment. The irony of calling it freedom while being terrified of dependent intimacy. We built a culture that worships independence so feverishly that partnership now feels like humiliation.

Everyone wants to be desired, but no one wants to be known. We want connection without the risk of being chosen, and rejection without the responsibility of having been rejected. We’ve created a generation too proud to admit they want to be loved, and too afraid to admit they already are.

And maybe that’s the quietest tragedy of all. We wanted to heal, to evolve, to unlearn our parents’ pain, and somewhere along the way, we forgot how to need another.

So I’m sad. Not from a place of superiority, but from a place of shared loss. Sad for my friend, still drowning in it—convinced she’s learning to swim while she’s just building a more elaborate way to ride her chaotic current. It must feel depleting, an addiction to the very thing that hollows you out. I hope she, and all of us, can see around it someday.

I hope she learns that unconditional love can’t coexist with conditional behavior. That you can’t receive what you refuse to give. Not in a harem, not at a round table, not in a party of a hundred, or even a few. Only ever in the quiet, terrifying, glorious space between two people who have chosen, and keep choosing, to not look away.