You peel back anthropology, psychology, myth, comedy, and cultural critique with a precision that is deeply human. Only you can do that. What I love the most is how gracefully you move between eras, between instinct and interface, between the ancient wiring in our ribcages and the fluorescent glow of our screens. You treat the reader as a fellow traveler, wandering through the maze with a torch you’ve lit from humor but mostly truth.
I see modern dating as the collapse of collective witnessing. For most of human history, love unfolded in communities that saw us, held us, contextualised us. Friends, neighbors, extended kin were the silent structure around romance, the background chorus that validated connection and softened heartbreak. Now we date in private, inside enclosed digital ecosystems where nothing is witnessed except by the algorithm. And I think part of what feels so disorienting is that we are constantly trying to build intimacy without an audience, but heal from intimacy without a village.
Another idea your writing evokes, the hyper-selfhood paradox. We’ve built an age obsessed with self-knowledge, I am so tired of hearing about attachment styles, love languages, trauma maps but all this introspection sometimes becomes a hall of mirrors. We become so fluent in our patterns that we pre-reject anyone who might disrupt them. We date with expectations and diagnostic checklists. It’s pathetic really. And the tragedy is that we’ve become better at identifying our wounds than at imagining a future where we grow past them. You captured this beautifully in your reflections on pre-emptive confessions, the way we mistake self-aware disclaimers for vulnerability when they are, in fact, carefully engineered escape hatches.
I am fascinated by your idea that we are the first generation in history asked to create romantic meaning without inherited metaphysics. Not only are the old scripts gone, the gods are gone too. We don’t have divine narratives telling us what love is for. We must build it ourselves, ethically, consciously, from scratch. What an existential apprenticeship. And you capture that in its bones: dating as philosophy, as myth-making, as an ongoing experiment in becoming.
Your writing is exceptional, sharp without cruelty, tender without sentimentality, funny without cynicism. I love and could quote every single paragraph. You’ve created a cultural diagnosis wrapped in poetry. And perhaps most importantly, you offer neither despair nor false hope, but something clarity with compassion. Again, I don’t know anyone who can write like you.
This was a joy to read, and even more of a joy to think alongside, and to support in the best way I could! I admire you, Tamara.
Your phrase collapse of collective witnessing stays ringing in my mind, but maybe what we’re experiencing isn’t only the disappearance of the village, but the inflation of the self into something the village was never designed to carry? There’s a loneliness built into that architecture. When the community dissolves, the self becomes both protagonist and entire audience, which is why modern dating feels like performing a monologue in an empty theatre: the lights are on, the script is marked, the emotion is real……. but the house seats don’t breathe back.
And without that breathing-back, everything becomes magnified. Every gesture feels like a referendum on our worth; every disappointment echoes longer because there’s no shared container to absorb the sound. We have lost witnesses, we have lost the buffering effect that prevents two people from becoming each other’s entire emotional ecosystem too quickly.
Your point about hyper-selfhood hits the same nerve. I often think the contemporary instinct to “understand ourselves completely” is a disguised attempt to eliminate surprise because surprise, in love, is the one thing we cannot control! We’ve professionalised self-analysis, but the irony is that intimacy still ambushes us in the places our frameworks don’t reach. The hall of mirrors beautifully reflects but it’s impossible to exit without smacking into your own face.
And yes, the absence of metaphysics leaves us naked in a way no previous generation has had to negotiate. When the gods withdraw, responsibility becomes absolute. We must invent cosmologies that fit 2 humans at a time. That’s an unbearable demand if one approaches it with perfection in mind, but strangely liberating if approached with humility. Love becomes less about destiny and more about craftsmanship…2 imperfect people shaping a narrative with limited tools and infinite improvisation.
The one consolation, perhaps, is that such a landscape forces us back into sincerity, because without inherited scripts, sincerity is the only compass left. It doesn’t promise epics, but it does keep us oriented toward something real.
Your reading of my work here is one of the most generous interpretations I’ve ever received. Thank you for the depth of thought, Céline, for the seriousness with which you engage, and for the way you make the labyrinth feel a little less solitary, and for supporting my art like a true mécène, you’re one of a kind!
What a beautiful and encouraging gesture, Céline. Seeing friends both able and willing to support art with honesty and no script in this way, instead of companies that come with money and strings attached, feels deeply dignifying and hopeful for the future of the arts.
Tamara… my God! Sometimes I wish I could look into your mind. You are a true cultural anthropologist.
Your talent is terrifying, the type that makes other writers reconsider their vocations, the one that fuses wit and depth the way Baldwin fused anger and grace.
We’re living through cognitive inflation. Expectations have risen faster than emotional wages. Barry Schwartz famously wrote that too much choice creates paralysis, but less often discussed is the expectation inflation that follows abundance. When options multiply, standards detonate.
Modern dating is the romantic equivalent of what Daniel Kahneman called “the focusing illusion”: when everything becomes available, we assume everything should be perfect, and the human nervous system simply wasn’t built for that economy.
Your Costco-cart metaphor is perfect. I’ll add that our carts got bigger; our capacity to carry them did not.
You mention how compatibility is now negotiated rather than destined. I’d take it further, compatibility has become commodified. People talk about it the way they talk about smartphones: features, updates, integrations, red flags as factory defects. We treat partners like operating systems that should sync with minimal friction. Milan Kundera, and I know he’s one of your favorite authors, reminds us that “love begins at the point when a person chooses a weakness of another person and decides to nourish it.” The modern mind, overstimulated and under-rooted, has almost forgotten that.
One of your most brilliant threads is our allergic reaction to discomfort. We’ve pathologised ambivalence.
But all mature love requires ambivalence. Modern dating tries to negotiate intimacy in a world that treats hesitation as a glitch rather than the natural tempo of two psyches learning to orbit. We expect people to know instantly—
Who they are.
What they want.
How they feel.
Where this is going.
What their trauma profile is.
Why their last three relationships ended.
Ambivalence used to be a phase.
Now it’s a “red flag”. No wonder everyone’s tired.
You rightly mock the “height crisis”, and I laughed so hard! Of course it’s easy when you’re tall, it’s hilarious. But the truth is attraction is no longer primarily biological; it is symbolic.
Pierre Bourdieu would tell us that modern dating is a marketplace of cultural capital. Height is shorthand for competence; education for safety; aesthetic taste for emotional intelligence; playlists for personality.
You’re not being evaluated as a body but as a symbolic ecosystem.
And symbols are exhausting to maintain.
We also talk about vulnerability as risk, but I’d argue the modern terror is premature legibility. Every gesture, emoji, typing bubble, and pause can be interpreted through 400 TikTok videos, and people fear being too easily decoded. Not misunderstood,
too understood! Huge difference.
Modern romance demands Maslow-level connection, but we’re still running Paleolithic firmware.No previous era asked lovers to be: therapists, best friends, co-parents-in-theory, politically aligned, aesthetic matches, emotionally fluent, sexually enlightened, financially stable AND spiritually attuned.
I’d that dating??? I guess I’d call it multidisciplinary fellowship program.
We are requiring from one partner what used to be provided by an entire village.
You end with sincerity. I’ll end with something adjacent: the bravest act now is to choose imperfection deliberately, to stop treating partners as “potential upgrades”.
Tamara, your writing is a lighthouse in the fog, philosophical, wickedly funny, surgically observant. This essay is formidable.
Your conclusion offers a way through, not out.
Keep writing like this! It makes the Minotaur nervous.
P.S. Thank you for your generosity, Céline, what a brilliant idea! You inspire us.
Sometimes I think what we call “modern dating problems” are just the visible symptoms of a deeper cultural overextension. We have expanded the requirements of love to an impossible scale and then wonder why everyone feels like they’re failing. We all think it’s a psychological crisis, but I’d call it an architectural one. Like we built a cathedral and handed people a screwdriver.
You’re right about expectation inflation, but I’d add that abundance has destabilised our sense of proportion. We lost the instinct that tells us which qualities matter over a lifetime and which belong in a marketing brochure. Half the suffering comes from confusing the two. It’s astonishing how much anxiety evaporates the moment someone realises they don’t actually need a polymath with perfect attachment scores, just a person whose presence doesn’t make their nervous system rehearse its exit.
Your point about compatibility being commodified is brilliant, but I see another pathology emerging: we’ve made “alignment” so totalising that any friction now feels like philosophical betrayal. People mistake difference for danger as though intellectual or emotional pluralism were radioactive rather than the raw material of depth. The assumption that two fully formed adults should merge seamlessly is one of the most bizarre fantasies of the digital age!!!!
Even machinery has tolerance thresholds; why shouldn’t hearts?!?!
And yes, legibility…. this is the part that fascinates me. The fear is no longer that someone won’t “get” us; it’s that they will, too quickly, too accurately, before we’ve curated the version of ourselves we believe is safest. But complete legibility has always been the beginning of intimacy, not its downfall. What scares people is that legibility forces them to stop hiding behind narrative because it’s much easier to disappear behind irony or analysis than to be perceived in the un-edited light of day.
Your observation about a partner replacing an entire village is painfully correct. We behave as though one person should carry the emotional functions once distributed across friends, elders, siblings, spiritual guides, and communal norms. No wonder relationships collapse under their own weight: we’ve turned intimacy into infrastructure. How odd is this?!
But I don’t think the solution is lowering standards, I think it’s redistributing them, returning some expectations to friendships, to community, to self-responsibility. Letting a lover be a lover instead of an economy. A relationship isn’t meant to be an institution; it’s a meeting point, a place to exhale, not a performance review.
Your final point about choosing imperfection is the one that rings the loudest… as maturity. There’s a dignity in saying: “I’m not looking for a flawless partner; I’m looking for a human one”…. someone whose flaws are navigable and whose presence feels like oxygen rather than obligation.
And the Minotaur should be nervous… clarity is the only threat he’s never been able to outwit!
Thank you, Alexander, for reading me with such intellectual generosity and fierceness; you turn the comment section into its own anthropology, for sure!
I don’t have anything as insightful as your comment to add, but your identification of the fear of being too misunderstood actually took my breath away for a moment with its sheer truth. You’re completely right and I’ve never heard anyone put it so well before.
Tamara, this is so good I’m convinced you opened a wormhole and let the collective unconscious of every dating-era human monologue through you like a very eloquent oracle with Wi-Fi.
Reading you felt like watching someone dissect modern romance with the precision of a surgeon and the comedic timing of someone who knows the patient is also the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and occasionally the janitor sweeping up emotional debris.
I swear you’ve mapped the modern dating ecosystem with the accuracy of a naturalist studying a very confused species, Homo Swipe-Sapiens, trying to mate while simultaneously installing firmware updates on their coping mechanisms.
Your “Top-Shelf Theory” is already Pulitzer-worthy, but then you casually expand it into a whole treatise on how we’re basically ancient mammals cosplaying as emotionally optimized software. Iconic!
What I love the most is how you frame dating as an evolutionary side quest, like humanity is collectively beta-testing the next patch for intimacy while the gods watch from the balcony eating popcorn and muttering, “…this is not what we wrote in the myth.”
Your insight about abundance is devastatingly true because we are really all stuck in a perpetual tasting menu of romantic previews, numbing ourselves with samples until we forget how hunger actually feels. Algorithms have turned desire into a compliance form. Eros didn’t stand a chance
And that final image, finding the person who says “the Minotaur can wait”, holy hell! Romantic, hilarious, and spiritually so Museguided. Because honestly, the Minotaur is probably tired too.
This whole essay is a masterpiece of emotional anthropology. Sharp, generous, wickedly funny, and, most importantly, human.
I’d read a whole book of this. You are, unequivocally, in your myth-making era.
If I’m an oracle, it’s only because modern dating keeps handing us prophecy disguised as comedy, and I sometimes think the entire ecosystem operates like one long cosmic experiment in which the variables keep changing faster than the participants. No wonder we look deranged…. we’re running Paleolithic impulses on futuristic hardware, praying the update doesn’t crash in the middle of the conversation :)
What fascinates me the most is that everyone thinks they’re navigating this landscape alone, when in reality we’re all glitching in synchrony. We talk about dating as if it were a personal failure rather than a collective design problem: too many inputs, too few instincts permitted to lead. Human beings were not built to evaluate potential lovers with the same cognitive posture used to compare noise-cancelling headphones.
Your “Homo Swipe-Sapiens” image is perfect!!! but here’s the darker twist… the more we refine our selection criteria, the worse our selections become. Hyper-optimisation is a terrible strategy for romance. It turns desire into a procurement process. Passion was never meant to be ISO-certified.
And yes, abundance rewires hunger. When everything is available, nothing feels urgent. People are obviously picky while they have forgotten the difference between discernment and delay. Algorithms didn’t kill Eros; they just drowned him in options!
As for the Minotaur… he IS tired, but I suspect what exhausts him is watching humans sprint past their own openings for intimacy while searching for mythical clarity. The monster has more patience than half the singles market.
Your comment, Clara, is its own mythology, wildly funny and unexpectedly accurate. Thank you for reading me with this much imagination and generosity!
You are a constant inspiration. You don’t publish enough. I would read you non stop. Thank you for your art, Tamara. I know you work relentlessly and you need all your readers support. Art should never come for free.
That’s why we should all be grateful for all your regular paying subscribers, your Patrons of the Arts, and people like Céline, who are truly inspiring mécènes. This is noble.
Sincere thanks to Celine Artaud for making this magnificent newsletter more widely available.
Also, a quick shout out to Tamara herself for the artworks and respective captions she freely gives us in all her works. Under her deliberate and effective design, they masterfully accessorize each essay and bring rich emotional visuals to the writing. In this particular case, they perform double duty, acting as metaphors of successful dating dynamics. The caption and the visual image merge into a couple and bring the dance of the underlying arguments into the spotlight. As a general rule, the contribution of these extra works never fails to amaze me. Through their selective use she manages to add even greater depth and joy to her pieces. Thank you, Tamara, for going the further distance.
Wow! what a romp! This was fun like a carnival. I know, I know, it’s a serious matter. Honestly, it’s even more serious than it first appears because it speaks to the human condition beyond the rails of its titular subject. Still, the writing is, as always, so fluid it’s as if someone invented a way to put scoop ice cream into a soft ice cream dispenser. Rich, thick topics delivered in completely smooth textures.
The flavor variety that stands out to me today is this: about forty years ago the collective dating pool switched from the template model to a sort of private capital bail out system. Each irrational exuberance became back stopped, like every other system in our coddled world, because fragile egos had grown too big to fail. Failure is not an option in today’s free market of privatized connections. Not because it’s never a reality, but because it’s simply denied. It’s not allowed. Failure, a by-product of the outdated template model, doesn’t exist today in any real sense. Interest rates on performance have fallen to near-zero levels, lowered so every vulnerability could continue to stand in the competitive market place. The start-ups interact without ever having to open their books to public auditing.
Each participant submits their personal 10-K form without exposing any faults; all the risks are simply covered up or outsourced. External audits, when they do happen, rubber stamp the narrative as if exposition is reality. The wider community has no stake in anyone’s private business. The community merely facilitates the continuance of the performance. Bankruptcy before your peers is not even necessary. Ghosting is simpler, less bureaucratic, and cleaner. It’s a free market. Utterly unregulated. Completely privatized.
Benefits adhere to the good performers while emotional externalities are being sloughed off to various unsightly trauma troughs. All this works, of course, until it doesn’t.
I think this essay’s brilliant benefactor, Celine, got it right in her astute comment above: intimacy is being practiced outside the village that might have given it some edges, borders within which it could be named, where it could flourish. As valiantly as Tamara tries to rescue the isolated bodies from the flames, I’m inclined to say connection in this new environment blows through the culture like bubbles in the wind: there are explosive collisions where two bubbles annihilate one another, there are connections where two become fused into a single co-dependent unit, and there are others, many others, that float aimlessly in the sky never quite bumping into anything substantial.
What you say about the “free-market privatisation” of intimacy is sooo accurate, but I’d go even deeper, the market is deregulated, yes, but we have also replaced relational accountability with aesthetics of accountability. We perform transparency instead of practicing it. We curate “emotional fluency” in the same way companies curate ESG scores, lots of reporting, very little action. A self-audit with no auditor. Pathetic but real!
And because failure has been rebranded as embarrassment rather than experience, people treat vulnerability as a reputational hazard rather than a relational currency. We’ve moralised exposure, ghosting becomes the logical solution because people are terrified of the data trail that truth leaves behind (and because they are also cruel!).
Yes, connection no longer happens within a community that can metabolise it. When intimacy loses its ecosystem, it loses its integrity, becoming a sealed container with no oxygen exchange, two private psyches trying to sustain a flame that was once supported by a whole structure of witnesses, norms, rituals, shared narratives.
The irony is that we’ve never had more “freedom” in love, and yet we’ve never been more structurally malnourished. The village supervised relationships but also stabilised them. It gave contour, consequence, rhythm. Without it, everything becomes frictionless to the point of evaporation. Not tragedy. Just entropy….
And your bubble imagery…. Hmmmm let me counter it with something equally unromantic: most people are circling in microclimates of their own making. They never collide because collision now feels like liability. The modern heart doesn’t fear being broken anymore, that’s a thing of the past, not it fears being inconvenient. And inconvenience is what relationships are made of.
As for the artwork, oh, Andrew, thank you for noticing!!! Each piece is chosen to smuggle an emotional layer that prose alone can’t fully carry. The caption is the hinge, the visual is the door, the essay is the room. I try to make them speak to one another. I don’t know how many notice that though, and when someone mentions it I’m ecstatic. Thank you!
And yes, Céline’s instinct to let this essay travel further was incredible. She allowed a luxury for every reader to write in a space where they engage with such intensity, intelligence, and seriousness.
Thank you for this extraordinary analysis, you’ve widened the frame in exactly the way I hoped the essay would provoke, and as you always do!
From my perspective, the core problem with all interpersonal relationships in the modern world, dating included, is that our views of others and ourselves is trapped in a sort of panoptical distortion field. There used to be utility in caring about what other people thought and how you were perceived, and perhaps it's still like that in some places in the world; in the spaces where reputation is the currency, not fame, or "clout". The difference is that reputation matters with a single person, whereas fame/clout are dependent upon drawing attention from the masses. And unlike reputation, whether the attention is positive or negative is irrelevant, and it's often negative attention that catapults people to fame or infamy faster. Additionally, the appeal-to-the-masses clout-chasing is parasocial and one-sided, which means that while you're busy drawing eyes, you're not looking at or seeing others, and this is absolute poison when it comes to personal relationships.
If the mechanism behind the panopticon is to force people to behave as if they're being watched, the modern version of this is everyone being the star of their own reality television show, in which case every co-star or walk-on extra must audition for their role, and that brings us to dating based on perquisites and checklists, which themselves are based on this false paradigm of being watched.
A woman can't date a man shorter than her; how would that LOOK? And he can't be the same height either, because what if she wants to wear heels? So there needs to be, what, a 4 inch buffer? Nah, make it 6 inches, or maybe 8-10 if the woman is shorter, because men lie about their height anyway, right? How many 6-footers are actually 5-10ers with work boots?
When you meet people in person, and don't prequalify them with a checklist made under the panoptical gaze, all of the unquantifiable stuff — the stuff we've evolved to pick up on face-to-face, with all of our senses — plays its preprogrammed primordial role, and most of us shake off all of the clout-seeking nonsense and just go with the chemistry. In that sense, not much has changed. What the technology has done isn't change our biology, but it has put obstacles up to keep us detached, second-guessing, and perpetually searching.
This is a fantastic essay, Tamara! And we should all thank your wonderful patron, Madame @Céline Artaud; the culture needs this work.
Ahhhhh…. the modern panopticon of the self is exactly why so many people feel exhausted before the date even begins. It’s tragic that we’re being watched but more tragic that we’ve internalised a version of ourselves that is performing for an imaginary jury. And the more imaginary the audience, the more tyrannical it becomes. Real people are forgiving; fictional spectators are merciless!
I often think the real distortion is anticipation. We don’t fear how something looks, we fear how it might be interpreted by invisible others. Which means the anxiety isn’t social at all; it’s metaphysical. It’s the terror of being misread by a crowd that isn’t even present.
This is why checklists metastasize. They’re not actually about compatibility but about preemptively managing humiliation…. height, income, aesthetics, politics aren’t preferences so much as protective spells, rituals meant to ensure we never end up “looking foolish” to a tribunal that has no name and no face. People filter to avoid embarrassment more than disappointment.
The irony, of course, is that the moment you encounter someone in the wild, without the prophylactic buffer of apps and curated profiles, your biology immediately overrides your branding strategy. Chemistry does not care about optics. No algorithm can mimic the visceral shift that happens when someone’s tone or timing hits the exact frequency your nervous system didn’t know it had been waiting for. In that split second, the panopticon collapses like cheap scenery.
But technology, as you say, keeps rebuilding it. It didn’t change our instincts, but it intervenes before the instincts can do their job. We aren’t falling out of love with humans; we’re just falling in love with filters, which is a far more hopeless affair. And “hopeless” is a kind word here.
Thank you, Andrew, for such a thoughtful, unique and piercing comment, and yes, Céline deserves all the gratitude for making sure this essay makes its way into the world, and not only for my most loyal paying subscribers!
Lovely and insightful, Tamara. I think the erosion of culture such as in Canada (I am also Canadian, but born in Poland), here is a real problem: a man can behave a certain way that will instantly snap me into being a better woman, but it's because his behaviour is rooted in familiar culture and values. When it is eroded, nullified, made so bland that it's solidified in brutalist architecture everywhere you look (including unkempt women parading in pajamas on the subway), it makes people paradoxically paranoid, not free. Seeing people embrace self-dignity breeds more dignity and respect from others. Why I think that the cultural environment and alignment with it, really matters. I can't construct dancing the Viennese Waltz in an empty bland hall here the way I imagine I would at the Vienna Opera Ball, if ever given the glorious opportunity to go! The feeling or energy will never be the same. There are some things that you miss so much that you just can't construct. Paulina.
It’s interesting how cultural texture shapes our sense of identity in real time. We pretend we are autonomous beings floating above context, but most of us are actually responding to the frame around us, the architecture, the norms, the aesthetics, the small rituals that tell us what is possible here and what is not. When the environment becomes culturally thin, people become behaviourally thin. It’s very hard to feel expansive in a place that feels emotionally flat.
Dignity is indeed contagious, I’m not referring to performative dignity but the lived version, the one you feel when someone has an internal compass shaped by history, by inherited codes of grace, by a sense of place. When that disappears from the collective atmosphere, everyone becomes jumpier, more defensive, more self-conscious. Chaos disorients, obviously!
This is why cultural fit matters far more than any dating advice ever admits. Nationalism or nostalgia?! Nine! Only resonance. About finding someone whose gestures, humour, timing, and moral instincts feel like they come from the same invisible alphabet. You can’t fabricate that by sheer will. You can’t “visualise” it into existence. It’s either encoded in the surrounding culture or it isn’t. As simple as that!
The environment will always set the emotional temperature. You cannot summon the elegance of the Vienna Opera Ball inside a mall-lit subway car. Sorry! Atmosphere isn’t decorative; it’s instructive, teaching the body how to behave, how to desire, how to soften. When the atmosphere degrades, we lose those cues, and relationships suffer in ways that have nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with place.
Some things really can’t be reconstructed. And sometimes the deepest homesickness is not for a country, but for a cultural frequency.
Thank you, Paulina, for bringing this dimension into the conversation because I feel it’s an essential one that we could debate for hours!
Your extraction of Sincerity as the most essential quality of choosing a relationship is to ground the connection as one would ground lightning. The spark alights, but the hesitation inhibits, because lightning, although beautiful, can also leave catastrophic burns. And no one wants to be scarred. So the dance of sparks blown out swiftly to spare any scars is a dance card written in invisible ink, a way to back away from the knowing to remain unknown and secure in self ownership rather than uncertain surrender.
Your insightful writing is always filled with humor and wisdom, Tamara!
Cathie, what I find the most tragic in the way we handle modern connection is that we keep mistaking risk for injury. As if the act of feeling something were already proof of impending harm. But the truth is that most people aren’t afraid of being burned, they’re afraid of being changed. Burns heal; transformation doesn’t return what it took.
Sincerity, for me, is the grounding rod, the thing that keeps intensity from mutating into chaos. Not a safeguard from pain but a structure for meaning. When someone shows up sincerely, even loss becomes legible; even endings retain dignity. Without sincerity, everything collapses into interpretation and guesswork, which is the real violence of modern dating, the way ambiguity wounds more deeply than rejection ever could. Sincerity is everything for me!
And yes, the hesitation is understandable. We live in a culture that worships autonomy with such fervour that surrender feels like self-erasure. But connection is a recalibration, the people who fear “losing themselves” in love are often the ones who never got to experience a form of intimacy that allowed expansion instead of contraction.
If anything, sincerity is the antidote to the very insecurity we try to outrun, it roots the encounter in something sturdier than hope and far more honest than performance.
Thank you for reading me with such acuity and generosity!
Wow. This will almost certainly become a legendary piece. Layer upon layer of wisdom gathered in one post. Thank you, Céline, for sharing it and making it reach more readers. And thank you, Tamara, for writing it.
I sometimes think essays like this one only resonate because they tap into a collective confusion we’ve all been hauling around like emotional luggage with a missing tag.
And if it becomes “legendary”, it will be for the simplest reason that people recognised themselves in it, even the parts they pretend to have outgrown.
Your breakdown of the modern dating maze is spot on. People keep calling it a labyrinth as if there is some hidden treasure at the end, but most of the time it feels like emotional pattern recognition mixed with self preservation. You capture that strange mix of hope, chaos and self awareness that defines dating today.
What really stands out is the clarity. You are not blaming, romanticizing or catastrophizing. You are naming the complexity in a way that feels both smart and human. It is refreshing to read someone who sees the game without becoming cynical about the players.
Stunning. Your sense of humor sizzles. And in an essay chock full of literary gold, the line about smelling like burnt sugar and late-night indecision lingers with me the most. Also, your thoughts make me want to go back in time and meet my wife all over again because we were surely navigating all of the above, and somehow we got to the core of each other. Likely through a whole lot of sincerity. Actually, I can’t wait to greet her this morning. I will certainly look at her in a new light after reading your lovely words.
What you wrote here is the proof that all the chaos, theory, and comedy in the essay were ultimately pointing toward something very simple. When sincerity enters the room, everything else becomes negotiable. It’s the one force that cuts through the noise because it’s disarming. People underestimate how rare it is to meet someone who shows you their inner coordinates without pre-editing them. You and your wife clearly found that rare opening early on, even if neither of you had language for it at the time.
Most long-term relationships survive on rhythm; they deepen on rediscovery. It’s amazing how one small shift in perspective can illuminate a person you already know intimately. The familiarity remains, but the perception sharpens.
If anything I wrote sent you into your morning with that kind of clarity, then the entire labyrinth was worth it.
Thank you for sharing this, Boo, your comment carries a tenderness that says more about you (and your marriage) than any essay ever could!
Another view of this from the polytheistic lens would have it that this cyberworld is the domain of the hermes/mercury archetype, whose preemptive techno-wizardry of internet communication has put us in a hermetically sealed environ immune to the work of eros and his entourage of fauns and nymphs, which would connect us most directly to the social other.
Also, Mike Brock's recent essay on the lost "tragic dimension" as well, points to where the silicon valley AI world is blocking off any remnant awareness of a reality where we can fail and fall from the high wire we are walking on, and that only there is life and freedom possible, and meaning made. The effect of such a frictionless algorithm is putting us in a state of denial and unfreedom.
So the village hasn't disappeared, nor have the gods fled. For Jung, hermes is a trickster god. He has occluded the wider world of his archetypal peers as if to say, this is my world not yours, so bud out! Harnessed in such an all encompassing cybernetic structure makes it truly difficult for other aspects of the full range of our psychological being to be involved, which is coeval with village life.
The repression of the wide bandwidth of archetypal potencies as well as the village where we actually live in a place, will return, maybe through our unfiltered inferior functions, and/or the need to work with our greater community to voice one's citizenry concerns for our overall well-being, through the mercurial haze of a misaligned monomyth by a usurper trickster god.
The last person that asked me if I wanted to date her was a nocturnal dream presence, as the dream-I was being shown the surprising possibilities of multiple dimensions in the inscapes of the psyche. The inner world is ripe for our engagement, too!
And thank you Mme. Celine Artaud, for sponsoring this head-spinning Museguided essay which has no limits to its audience, for all its relevance and erudition, and that highlights the due diligence Tamara has put into it, composing her complete and poignant array of preeminent thought! Brava!
From Turquoise & Michael, the Whidbey Island Hoopers, USA.
What you’ve described through the Hermes–Eros split is the psychic tension I feel. The modern world has elevated the messenger above the message. Hermes governs speed, exchange, mediation, trickery, thresholds, signals. Eros governs collision, embodiment, risk, and, most importantly, disruption. When Hermes runs the entire ecosystem, we end up with a civilisation of immaculate communication and impoverished connection.
But the problem isn’t that Hermes dominates. We’ve forgotten he was never meant to be a sovereign. He’s a psychopomp, a guide, a liminal figure, not a monarch. When the trickster becomes the architect of the relational world, intimacy becomes an infinite hallway of doors, cleverly labeled, rapidly accessible, but mostly leading nowhere. Eros was always meant to interrupt Hermes, not get routed through him!
Silicon Valley erased stakes. Tragedy requires consequences, and algorithms exist to remove friction. When nothing costs anything, not time, not reputation, not vulnerability, nothing can be deeply valued. We’ve made the high wire thick as a highway, then wondered why no one experiences awe while crossing it.
Your point that the village hasn’t disappeared is also crucial. It’s still there…. only muffled, anesthetised, drowned in notifications. The gods didn’t flee; we stopped listening to the frequencies where they speak. And when Hermes monopolises the bandwidth, the other archetypes get exiled to dreams, as in yours, where the psyche tries to smuggle back a multiplicity the waking world keeps flattening.
I actually think the return you predict is already underway, but through the backdoor… people are exhausted by frictionlessness. They crave inefficiency, slowness, a little sacred difficulty. They want conversations with weight, communities with edges, encounters that demand something of them. When the collective nervous system becomes this overstimulated, the inferior functions, as you beautifully put it, eventually force a compensatory renaissance.
Your dream anecdote made me smile because the psyche is the one place Hermes cannot fully hijack. Dreams refuse the notorious optimisation. They won’t stay within a single archetype, they restore plurality when waking consciousness becomes monolithic.
Both of you, Turquoise and Michael, are incredibly generous. Thank you for reading with this level of symbolic sensitivity and for bringing such a rare blend of imagination, mythic literacy, and grounded humanity into my Museguided conversations!
We are both so grateful to be a part of the readership of your incisively encircling, cultural and phenomenological Museguided scholarship that hovers over and takes deep dives into the contemporaneous now, with such a sweeping artistic and philosophical Parisian pen, all from our humble abode on this forested isle of Whidbey, in the middle of the mountain-ringed Salish Sea...pretty darn cool! Thank you Tamara, the dialogue holds the mark of excellence from the get go, all the way through!
Interestingly our family all went to the Catholic School named Immaculate Conception.
Seems like with this bloodless techno-communication web, we are all back in the hold of the Counter-Reformation, with the AI Pope of the new Vatican of Silicon Valley?!
Well Tamara, it’s rare that an essay incises my own, profoundly instinctive feelings. And Celine’s response is written with such acuity that I cannot respond in any detailed way without risking transcription of both essays.
Whilst sounding contradictory, what I’d really like to say would require an entire evening’s discussion.
Your chronology of romantic desire & performance is unexpectedly similar to mine. And I’m one whose elevation rounds out to 5’9”. But as a man who’s exceeded 60, I consider myself fortunate that my Leo Sayeresque curls, which show no sign of disappearing, allow me to fraudulently pass as a 6’ 50yo. However, not as fortunate is the fact that I do not come across as a 50yo. In ways which you perceptively noted, & which really do matter, I’ve lost interest in frivolous, time wasting encounters, no matter how attractive she might be. And that about me is most definitely noticed by others.
When I walk down a street in Melbourne lined with desirable restaurants graced with seductive outdoor seating, Parisian-style, I notice that when I happen to engage glances with a seated patron, whether they or I are alone or in company, I am experienced enough to know that her look, often with a smile, is not about her, nor I, necessarily wishing to meet to take things further, but for the simple pleasure of knowing that it’s nice to be noticed, in a friendly & reassuring way. It happens also with males. It’s the very essence of humans being social animals. Very civilised.
I’ll finish by noting that ‘dating’ was rarely used in Australia when I was in my 20s. We used ‘seeing someone’ as the lowest tier, rising to ‘going out with someone’, for a more serious relationship. But the US influence has changed all that.
The exchanged glance that isn’t an invitation, just a momentary affirmation of mutual existence is what modern dating culture keeps trying to algorithmically replace and never succeeds at. Those micro-encounters are so civilised, they remind me that connection isn’t always a prelude; sometimes it’s simply a gesture of human recognition, a brief alignment of two inner worlds that expect nothing, demand nothing, but still leave a trace. Because we are obsessed with outcomes, these tiny, purposeless exchanges feel almost extraordinary.
And I think that’s why your experience resonates so strongly with what I wrote: the further one travels into maturity, not “age,” but maturity, the less tolerance there is for the performative aspects of romance. You start valuing coherence over spectacle, presence over potential, and the meaningful glance over the theatrical pursuit. And yes, people notice when someone carries that kind of discernment. At least I do.
I agree about “seeing someone”. It implies perception, curiosity, a mutual exploration of presence. Dating, in its current Americanised form, suggests structure, roles, expectations, the possibility of being evaluated. One is relational. The other is procedural. It’s no surprise that the more procedural the language becomes, the more people feel exhausted by the rituals attached to it.
Thank you for such a thoughtful, layered response, Russell!
In this instance, I suspect that you understand what I’m trying to explain, if not my own personality itself, better than I do.
On reflection, I haven’t changed at all, in what I’m attracted to, & not attracted to, in others. I recall at the age of 9 or 10, finding two girls our class, very appealing, and cute, without conscious awareness of anything sexual. Somewhat differently, I found two boys more interesting company than others, one for his sense of humour, the other, (having learned years later that my mother suffered a miscarriage following my sister’s birth, & prior to mine), that he may have represented the brother I never knew.
I’m convinced that instinct is a profound influence on whom we are drawn to. It’s something we cannot change.
This is the part of attraction people often try to out-argue with theory but never succeed because it lives deeper than preference. It’s not something we “decide”; it’s something that reveals itself long before the adult mind arrives with explanations. Attraction could be seen as a series of choices, but in reality it’s a continuity. You felt it at 9 or 10 because the psyche was already forming its coordinates: humour, warmth, familiarity, the echo of a sibling who never arrived. Those early instincts were precursors of your relational architecture.
Most people assume desire is primarily constructed through adulthood, experience, heartbreak, pattern, but the foundation is laid far earlier, and often for reasons we don’t consciously know until much later. What you call destiny is really the psyche’s long memory. We aren’t drawn to people randomly; we’re drawn to the emotional shapes that feel like “home”, even when we can’t say why. And the fact that your attractions have stayed consistent over decades signals coherence. You haven’t betrayed your inner compass; you’ve simply grown into it.
Ohhh yes, instinct plays a far larger role than people admit; it’s often the most reliable indicator of psychological truth. Instinct is destiny in the sense that certain relational patterns are organic to who we are. The beauty is that once we understand those early imprints, attraction becomes less mysterious, not less powerful. You’re not fated in the sense of being trapped, you become recognisable to yourself.
This paragraph gave me chills. I read it to C, who's trekked the labyrinth and fought the Minotaur shoulder to shoulder with me through so many years and adventures.
The one point I can add to your amazing essay is that the struggle and the journey can all be so, incredibly worth more than can be expressed.
The struggle is never a tax on love but the terrain of it. The labyrinth is the place where connection earns its meaning. Two people who’ve walked through complexity together aren’t simply bonded anymore, they are co-authors of a shared mythology. That’s a different order of intimacy.
It was late, the paragraph I referred to was the last one. I love the imagery of the labyrinth, and equal partners navigating its challenges in good cheer.
Tamara, this is more incandescent than usual.
You peel back anthropology, psychology, myth, comedy, and cultural critique with a precision that is deeply human. Only you can do that. What I love the most is how gracefully you move between eras, between instinct and interface, between the ancient wiring in our ribcages and the fluorescent glow of our screens. You treat the reader as a fellow traveler, wandering through the maze with a torch you’ve lit from humor but mostly truth.
I see modern dating as the collapse of collective witnessing. For most of human history, love unfolded in communities that saw us, held us, contextualised us. Friends, neighbors, extended kin were the silent structure around romance, the background chorus that validated connection and softened heartbreak. Now we date in private, inside enclosed digital ecosystems where nothing is witnessed except by the algorithm. And I think part of what feels so disorienting is that we are constantly trying to build intimacy without an audience, but heal from intimacy without a village.
Another idea your writing evokes, the hyper-selfhood paradox. We’ve built an age obsessed with self-knowledge, I am so tired of hearing about attachment styles, love languages, trauma maps but all this introspection sometimes becomes a hall of mirrors. We become so fluent in our patterns that we pre-reject anyone who might disrupt them. We date with expectations and diagnostic checklists. It’s pathetic really. And the tragedy is that we’ve become better at identifying our wounds than at imagining a future where we grow past them. You captured this beautifully in your reflections on pre-emptive confessions, the way we mistake self-aware disclaimers for vulnerability when they are, in fact, carefully engineered escape hatches.
I am fascinated by your idea that we are the first generation in history asked to create romantic meaning without inherited metaphysics. Not only are the old scripts gone, the gods are gone too. We don’t have divine narratives telling us what love is for. We must build it ourselves, ethically, consciously, from scratch. What an existential apprenticeship. And you capture that in its bones: dating as philosophy, as myth-making, as an ongoing experiment in becoming.
Your writing is exceptional, sharp without cruelty, tender without sentimentality, funny without cynicism. I love and could quote every single paragraph. You’ve created a cultural diagnosis wrapped in poetry. And perhaps most importantly, you offer neither despair nor false hope, but something clarity with compassion. Again, I don’t know anyone who can write like you.
This was a joy to read, and even more of a joy to think alongside, and to support in the best way I could! I admire you, Tamara.
Your phrase collapse of collective witnessing stays ringing in my mind, but maybe what we’re experiencing isn’t only the disappearance of the village, but the inflation of the self into something the village was never designed to carry? There’s a loneliness built into that architecture. When the community dissolves, the self becomes both protagonist and entire audience, which is why modern dating feels like performing a monologue in an empty theatre: the lights are on, the script is marked, the emotion is real……. but the house seats don’t breathe back.
And without that breathing-back, everything becomes magnified. Every gesture feels like a referendum on our worth; every disappointment echoes longer because there’s no shared container to absorb the sound. We have lost witnesses, we have lost the buffering effect that prevents two people from becoming each other’s entire emotional ecosystem too quickly.
Your point about hyper-selfhood hits the same nerve. I often think the contemporary instinct to “understand ourselves completely” is a disguised attempt to eliminate surprise because surprise, in love, is the one thing we cannot control! We’ve professionalised self-analysis, but the irony is that intimacy still ambushes us in the places our frameworks don’t reach. The hall of mirrors beautifully reflects but it’s impossible to exit without smacking into your own face.
And yes, the absence of metaphysics leaves us naked in a way no previous generation has had to negotiate. When the gods withdraw, responsibility becomes absolute. We must invent cosmologies that fit 2 humans at a time. That’s an unbearable demand if one approaches it with perfection in mind, but strangely liberating if approached with humility. Love becomes less about destiny and more about craftsmanship…2 imperfect people shaping a narrative with limited tools and infinite improvisation.
The one consolation, perhaps, is that such a landscape forces us back into sincerity, because without inherited scripts, sincerity is the only compass left. It doesn’t promise epics, but it does keep us oriented toward something real.
Your reading of my work here is one of the most generous interpretations I’ve ever received. Thank you for the depth of thought, Céline, for the seriousness with which you engage, and for the way you make the labyrinth feel a little less solitary, and for supporting my art like a true mécène, you’re one of a kind!
I am just your humble reader. And I would gladly support your art as often as I can.
What a beautiful gesture from a kind soul!
Thank you so much. :)
What a beautiful and encouraging gesture, Céline. Seeing friends both able and willing to support art with honesty and no script in this way, instead of companies that come with money and strings attached, feels deeply dignifying and hopeful for the future of the arts.
How beautifully you put it, Vlad!
Tamara… my God! Sometimes I wish I could look into your mind. You are a true cultural anthropologist.
Your talent is terrifying, the type that makes other writers reconsider their vocations, the one that fuses wit and depth the way Baldwin fused anger and grace.
We’re living through cognitive inflation. Expectations have risen faster than emotional wages. Barry Schwartz famously wrote that too much choice creates paralysis, but less often discussed is the expectation inflation that follows abundance. When options multiply, standards detonate.
Modern dating is the romantic equivalent of what Daniel Kahneman called “the focusing illusion”: when everything becomes available, we assume everything should be perfect, and the human nervous system simply wasn’t built for that economy.
Your Costco-cart metaphor is perfect. I’ll add that our carts got bigger; our capacity to carry them did not.
You mention how compatibility is now negotiated rather than destined. I’d take it further, compatibility has become commodified. People talk about it the way they talk about smartphones: features, updates, integrations, red flags as factory defects. We treat partners like operating systems that should sync with minimal friction. Milan Kundera, and I know he’s one of your favorite authors, reminds us that “love begins at the point when a person chooses a weakness of another person and decides to nourish it.” The modern mind, overstimulated and under-rooted, has almost forgotten that.
One of your most brilliant threads is our allergic reaction to discomfort. We’ve pathologised ambivalence.
But all mature love requires ambivalence. Modern dating tries to negotiate intimacy in a world that treats hesitation as a glitch rather than the natural tempo of two psyches learning to orbit. We expect people to know instantly—
Who they are.
What they want.
How they feel.
Where this is going.
What their trauma profile is.
Why their last three relationships ended.
Ambivalence used to be a phase.
Now it’s a “red flag”. No wonder everyone’s tired.
You rightly mock the “height crisis”, and I laughed so hard! Of course it’s easy when you’re tall, it’s hilarious. But the truth is attraction is no longer primarily biological; it is symbolic.
Pierre Bourdieu would tell us that modern dating is a marketplace of cultural capital. Height is shorthand for competence; education for safety; aesthetic taste for emotional intelligence; playlists for personality.
You’re not being evaluated as a body but as a symbolic ecosystem.
And symbols are exhausting to maintain.
We also talk about vulnerability as risk, but I’d argue the modern terror is premature legibility. Every gesture, emoji, typing bubble, and pause can be interpreted through 400 TikTok videos, and people fear being too easily decoded. Not misunderstood,
too understood! Huge difference.
Modern romance demands Maslow-level connection, but we’re still running Paleolithic firmware.No previous era asked lovers to be: therapists, best friends, co-parents-in-theory, politically aligned, aesthetic matches, emotionally fluent, sexually enlightened, financially stable AND spiritually attuned.
I’d that dating??? I guess I’d call it multidisciplinary fellowship program.
We are requiring from one partner what used to be provided by an entire village.
You end with sincerity. I’ll end with something adjacent: the bravest act now is to choose imperfection deliberately, to stop treating partners as “potential upgrades”.
Tamara, your writing is a lighthouse in the fog, philosophical, wickedly funny, surgically observant. This essay is formidable.
Your conclusion offers a way through, not out.
Keep writing like this! It makes the Minotaur nervous.
P.S. Thank you for your generosity, Céline, what a brilliant idea! You inspire us.
Sometimes I think what we call “modern dating problems” are just the visible symptoms of a deeper cultural overextension. We have expanded the requirements of love to an impossible scale and then wonder why everyone feels like they’re failing. We all think it’s a psychological crisis, but I’d call it an architectural one. Like we built a cathedral and handed people a screwdriver.
You’re right about expectation inflation, but I’d add that abundance has destabilised our sense of proportion. We lost the instinct that tells us which qualities matter over a lifetime and which belong in a marketing brochure. Half the suffering comes from confusing the two. It’s astonishing how much anxiety evaporates the moment someone realises they don’t actually need a polymath with perfect attachment scores, just a person whose presence doesn’t make their nervous system rehearse its exit.
Your point about compatibility being commodified is brilliant, but I see another pathology emerging: we’ve made “alignment” so totalising that any friction now feels like philosophical betrayal. People mistake difference for danger as though intellectual or emotional pluralism were radioactive rather than the raw material of depth. The assumption that two fully formed adults should merge seamlessly is one of the most bizarre fantasies of the digital age!!!!
Even machinery has tolerance thresholds; why shouldn’t hearts?!?!
And yes, legibility…. this is the part that fascinates me. The fear is no longer that someone won’t “get” us; it’s that they will, too quickly, too accurately, before we’ve curated the version of ourselves we believe is safest. But complete legibility has always been the beginning of intimacy, not its downfall. What scares people is that legibility forces them to stop hiding behind narrative because it’s much easier to disappear behind irony or analysis than to be perceived in the un-edited light of day.
Your observation about a partner replacing an entire village is painfully correct. We behave as though one person should carry the emotional functions once distributed across friends, elders, siblings, spiritual guides, and communal norms. No wonder relationships collapse under their own weight: we’ve turned intimacy into infrastructure. How odd is this?!
But I don’t think the solution is lowering standards, I think it’s redistributing them, returning some expectations to friendships, to community, to self-responsibility. Letting a lover be a lover instead of an economy. A relationship isn’t meant to be an institution; it’s a meeting point, a place to exhale, not a performance review.
Your final point about choosing imperfection is the one that rings the loudest… as maturity. There’s a dignity in saying: “I’m not looking for a flawless partner; I’m looking for a human one”…. someone whose flaws are navigable and whose presence feels like oxygen rather than obligation.
And the Minotaur should be nervous… clarity is the only threat he’s never been able to outwit!
Thank you, Alexander, for reading me with such intellectual generosity and fierceness; you turn the comment section into its own anthropology, for sure!
This is a subject you could turn into a book. I would devour it.
I don’t have anything as insightful as your comment to add, but your identification of the fear of being too misunderstood actually took my breath away for a moment with its sheer truth. You’re completely right and I’ve never heard anyone put it so well before.
Thank you, Adriana! Truly!
Tamara, this is so good I’m convinced you opened a wormhole and let the collective unconscious of every dating-era human monologue through you like a very eloquent oracle with Wi-Fi.
Reading you felt like watching someone dissect modern romance with the precision of a surgeon and the comedic timing of someone who knows the patient is also the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, and occasionally the janitor sweeping up emotional debris.
I swear you’ve mapped the modern dating ecosystem with the accuracy of a naturalist studying a very confused species, Homo Swipe-Sapiens, trying to mate while simultaneously installing firmware updates on their coping mechanisms.
Your “Top-Shelf Theory” is already Pulitzer-worthy, but then you casually expand it into a whole treatise on how we’re basically ancient mammals cosplaying as emotionally optimized software. Iconic!
What I love the most is how you frame dating as an evolutionary side quest, like humanity is collectively beta-testing the next patch for intimacy while the gods watch from the balcony eating popcorn and muttering, “…this is not what we wrote in the myth.”
Your insight about abundance is devastatingly true because we are really all stuck in a perpetual tasting menu of romantic previews, numbing ourselves with samples until we forget how hunger actually feels. Algorithms have turned desire into a compliance form. Eros didn’t stand a chance
And that final image, finding the person who says “the Minotaur can wait”, holy hell! Romantic, hilarious, and spiritually so Museguided. Because honestly, the Minotaur is probably tired too.
This whole essay is a masterpiece of emotional anthropology. Sharp, generous, wickedly funny, and, most importantly, human.
I’d read a whole book of this. You are, unequivocally, in your myth-making era.
Museguided — the myth creator.
If I’m an oracle, it’s only because modern dating keeps handing us prophecy disguised as comedy, and I sometimes think the entire ecosystem operates like one long cosmic experiment in which the variables keep changing faster than the participants. No wonder we look deranged…. we’re running Paleolithic impulses on futuristic hardware, praying the update doesn’t crash in the middle of the conversation :)
What fascinates me the most is that everyone thinks they’re navigating this landscape alone, when in reality we’re all glitching in synchrony. We talk about dating as if it were a personal failure rather than a collective design problem: too many inputs, too few instincts permitted to lead. Human beings were not built to evaluate potential lovers with the same cognitive posture used to compare noise-cancelling headphones.
Your “Homo Swipe-Sapiens” image is perfect!!! but here’s the darker twist… the more we refine our selection criteria, the worse our selections become. Hyper-optimisation is a terrible strategy for romance. It turns desire into a procurement process. Passion was never meant to be ISO-certified.
And yes, abundance rewires hunger. When everything is available, nothing feels urgent. People are obviously picky while they have forgotten the difference between discernment and delay. Algorithms didn’t kill Eros; they just drowned him in options!
As for the Minotaur… he IS tired, but I suspect what exhausts him is watching humans sprint past their own openings for intimacy while searching for mythical clarity. The monster has more patience than half the singles market.
Your comment, Clara, is its own mythology, wildly funny and unexpectedly accurate. Thank you for reading me with this much imagination and generosity!
You are a constant inspiration. You don’t publish enough. I would read you non stop. Thank you for your art, Tamara. I know you work relentlessly and you need all your readers support. Art should never come for free.
That’s why we should all be grateful for all your regular paying subscribers, your Patrons of the Arts, and people like Céline, who are truly inspiring mécènes. This is noble.
My gratitude is infinite.
Sincere thanks to Celine Artaud for making this magnificent newsletter more widely available.
Also, a quick shout out to Tamara herself for the artworks and respective captions she freely gives us in all her works. Under her deliberate and effective design, they masterfully accessorize each essay and bring rich emotional visuals to the writing. In this particular case, they perform double duty, acting as metaphors of successful dating dynamics. The caption and the visual image merge into a couple and bring the dance of the underlying arguments into the spotlight. As a general rule, the contribution of these extra works never fails to amaze me. Through their selective use she manages to add even greater depth and joy to her pieces. Thank you, Tamara, for going the further distance.
Wow! what a romp! This was fun like a carnival. I know, I know, it’s a serious matter. Honestly, it’s even more serious than it first appears because it speaks to the human condition beyond the rails of its titular subject. Still, the writing is, as always, so fluid it’s as if someone invented a way to put scoop ice cream into a soft ice cream dispenser. Rich, thick topics delivered in completely smooth textures.
The flavor variety that stands out to me today is this: about forty years ago the collective dating pool switched from the template model to a sort of private capital bail out system. Each irrational exuberance became back stopped, like every other system in our coddled world, because fragile egos had grown too big to fail. Failure is not an option in today’s free market of privatized connections. Not because it’s never a reality, but because it’s simply denied. It’s not allowed. Failure, a by-product of the outdated template model, doesn’t exist today in any real sense. Interest rates on performance have fallen to near-zero levels, lowered so every vulnerability could continue to stand in the competitive market place. The start-ups interact without ever having to open their books to public auditing.
Each participant submits their personal 10-K form without exposing any faults; all the risks are simply covered up or outsourced. External audits, when they do happen, rubber stamp the narrative as if exposition is reality. The wider community has no stake in anyone’s private business. The community merely facilitates the continuance of the performance. Bankruptcy before your peers is not even necessary. Ghosting is simpler, less bureaucratic, and cleaner. It’s a free market. Utterly unregulated. Completely privatized.
Benefits adhere to the good performers while emotional externalities are being sloughed off to various unsightly trauma troughs. All this works, of course, until it doesn’t.
I think this essay’s brilliant benefactor, Celine, got it right in her astute comment above: intimacy is being practiced outside the village that might have given it some edges, borders within which it could be named, where it could flourish. As valiantly as Tamara tries to rescue the isolated bodies from the flames, I’m inclined to say connection in this new environment blows through the culture like bubbles in the wind: there are explosive collisions where two bubbles annihilate one another, there are connections where two become fused into a single co-dependent unit, and there are others, many others, that float aimlessly in the sky never quite bumping into anything substantial.
What you say about the “free-market privatisation” of intimacy is sooo accurate, but I’d go even deeper, the market is deregulated, yes, but we have also replaced relational accountability with aesthetics of accountability. We perform transparency instead of practicing it. We curate “emotional fluency” in the same way companies curate ESG scores, lots of reporting, very little action. A self-audit with no auditor. Pathetic but real!
And because failure has been rebranded as embarrassment rather than experience, people treat vulnerability as a reputational hazard rather than a relational currency. We’ve moralised exposure, ghosting becomes the logical solution because people are terrified of the data trail that truth leaves behind (and because they are also cruel!).
Yes, connection no longer happens within a community that can metabolise it. When intimacy loses its ecosystem, it loses its integrity, becoming a sealed container with no oxygen exchange, two private psyches trying to sustain a flame that was once supported by a whole structure of witnesses, norms, rituals, shared narratives.
The irony is that we’ve never had more “freedom” in love, and yet we’ve never been more structurally malnourished. The village supervised relationships but also stabilised them. It gave contour, consequence, rhythm. Without it, everything becomes frictionless to the point of evaporation. Not tragedy. Just entropy….
And your bubble imagery…. Hmmmm let me counter it with something equally unromantic: most people are circling in microclimates of their own making. They never collide because collision now feels like liability. The modern heart doesn’t fear being broken anymore, that’s a thing of the past, not it fears being inconvenient. And inconvenience is what relationships are made of.
As for the artwork, oh, Andrew, thank you for noticing!!! Each piece is chosen to smuggle an emotional layer that prose alone can’t fully carry. The caption is the hinge, the visual is the door, the essay is the room. I try to make them speak to one another. I don’t know how many notice that though, and when someone mentions it I’m ecstatic. Thank you!
And yes, Céline’s instinct to let this essay travel further was incredible. She allowed a luxury for every reader to write in a space where they engage with such intensity, intelligence, and seriousness.
Thank you for this extraordinary analysis, you’ve widened the frame in exactly the way I hoped the essay would provoke, and as you always do!
From my perspective, the core problem with all interpersonal relationships in the modern world, dating included, is that our views of others and ourselves is trapped in a sort of panoptical distortion field. There used to be utility in caring about what other people thought and how you were perceived, and perhaps it's still like that in some places in the world; in the spaces where reputation is the currency, not fame, or "clout". The difference is that reputation matters with a single person, whereas fame/clout are dependent upon drawing attention from the masses. And unlike reputation, whether the attention is positive or negative is irrelevant, and it's often negative attention that catapults people to fame or infamy faster. Additionally, the appeal-to-the-masses clout-chasing is parasocial and one-sided, which means that while you're busy drawing eyes, you're not looking at or seeing others, and this is absolute poison when it comes to personal relationships.
If the mechanism behind the panopticon is to force people to behave as if they're being watched, the modern version of this is everyone being the star of their own reality television show, in which case every co-star or walk-on extra must audition for their role, and that brings us to dating based on perquisites and checklists, which themselves are based on this false paradigm of being watched.
A woman can't date a man shorter than her; how would that LOOK? And he can't be the same height either, because what if she wants to wear heels? So there needs to be, what, a 4 inch buffer? Nah, make it 6 inches, or maybe 8-10 if the woman is shorter, because men lie about their height anyway, right? How many 6-footers are actually 5-10ers with work boots?
When you meet people in person, and don't prequalify them with a checklist made under the panoptical gaze, all of the unquantifiable stuff — the stuff we've evolved to pick up on face-to-face, with all of our senses — plays its preprogrammed primordial role, and most of us shake off all of the clout-seeking nonsense and just go with the chemistry. In that sense, not much has changed. What the technology has done isn't change our biology, but it has put obstacles up to keep us detached, second-guessing, and perpetually searching.
This is a fantastic essay, Tamara! And we should all thank your wonderful patron, Madame @Céline Artaud; the culture needs this work.
Ahhhhh…. the modern panopticon of the self is exactly why so many people feel exhausted before the date even begins. It’s tragic that we’re being watched but more tragic that we’ve internalised a version of ourselves that is performing for an imaginary jury. And the more imaginary the audience, the more tyrannical it becomes. Real people are forgiving; fictional spectators are merciless!
I often think the real distortion is anticipation. We don’t fear how something looks, we fear how it might be interpreted by invisible others. Which means the anxiety isn’t social at all; it’s metaphysical. It’s the terror of being misread by a crowd that isn’t even present.
This is why checklists metastasize. They’re not actually about compatibility but about preemptively managing humiliation…. height, income, aesthetics, politics aren’t preferences so much as protective spells, rituals meant to ensure we never end up “looking foolish” to a tribunal that has no name and no face. People filter to avoid embarrassment more than disappointment.
The irony, of course, is that the moment you encounter someone in the wild, without the prophylactic buffer of apps and curated profiles, your biology immediately overrides your branding strategy. Chemistry does not care about optics. No algorithm can mimic the visceral shift that happens when someone’s tone or timing hits the exact frequency your nervous system didn’t know it had been waiting for. In that split second, the panopticon collapses like cheap scenery.
But technology, as you say, keeps rebuilding it. It didn’t change our instincts, but it intervenes before the instincts can do their job. We aren’t falling out of love with humans; we’re just falling in love with filters, which is a far more hopeless affair. And “hopeless” is a kind word here.
Thank you, Andrew, for such a thoughtful, unique and piercing comment, and yes, Céline deserves all the gratitude for making sure this essay makes its way into the world, and not only for my most loyal paying subscribers!
Nobody reads her like you do. Incredible.
And no one supports her like you do. Equally incredible. :)
Thank you, Andrew. She is the most amazing person I know and deserves the world.
Lovely and insightful, Tamara. I think the erosion of culture such as in Canada (I am also Canadian, but born in Poland), here is a real problem: a man can behave a certain way that will instantly snap me into being a better woman, but it's because his behaviour is rooted in familiar culture and values. When it is eroded, nullified, made so bland that it's solidified in brutalist architecture everywhere you look (including unkempt women parading in pajamas on the subway), it makes people paradoxically paranoid, not free. Seeing people embrace self-dignity breeds more dignity and respect from others. Why I think that the cultural environment and alignment with it, really matters. I can't construct dancing the Viennese Waltz in an empty bland hall here the way I imagine I would at the Vienna Opera Ball, if ever given the glorious opportunity to go! The feeling or energy will never be the same. There are some things that you miss so much that you just can't construct. Paulina.
It’s interesting how cultural texture shapes our sense of identity in real time. We pretend we are autonomous beings floating above context, but most of us are actually responding to the frame around us, the architecture, the norms, the aesthetics, the small rituals that tell us what is possible here and what is not. When the environment becomes culturally thin, people become behaviourally thin. It’s very hard to feel expansive in a place that feels emotionally flat.
Dignity is indeed contagious, I’m not referring to performative dignity but the lived version, the one you feel when someone has an internal compass shaped by history, by inherited codes of grace, by a sense of place. When that disappears from the collective atmosphere, everyone becomes jumpier, more defensive, more self-conscious. Chaos disorients, obviously!
This is why cultural fit matters far more than any dating advice ever admits. Nationalism or nostalgia?! Nine! Only resonance. About finding someone whose gestures, humour, timing, and moral instincts feel like they come from the same invisible alphabet. You can’t fabricate that by sheer will. You can’t “visualise” it into existence. It’s either encoded in the surrounding culture or it isn’t. As simple as that!
The environment will always set the emotional temperature. You cannot summon the elegance of the Vienna Opera Ball inside a mall-lit subway car. Sorry! Atmosphere isn’t decorative; it’s instructive, teaching the body how to behave, how to desire, how to soften. When the atmosphere degrades, we lose those cues, and relationships suffer in ways that have nothing to do with psychology and everything to do with place.
Some things really can’t be reconstructed. And sometimes the deepest homesickness is not for a country, but for a cultural frequency.
Thank you, Paulina, for bringing this dimension into the conversation because I feel it’s an essential one that we could debate for hours!
For sure, we could, at the Palais Garnier! :-) The subway metaphor made me laugh out loud! Very funny. Thank you, Tamara. Paulina
Waiting for you in Paris for endless fascinating conversations!
I will be there in 2026!! :-). Can't wait! xx
Your extraction of Sincerity as the most essential quality of choosing a relationship is to ground the connection as one would ground lightning. The spark alights, but the hesitation inhibits, because lightning, although beautiful, can also leave catastrophic burns. And no one wants to be scarred. So the dance of sparks blown out swiftly to spare any scars is a dance card written in invisible ink, a way to back away from the knowing to remain unknown and secure in self ownership rather than uncertain surrender.
Your insightful writing is always filled with humor and wisdom, Tamara!
Cathie, what I find the most tragic in the way we handle modern connection is that we keep mistaking risk for injury. As if the act of feeling something were already proof of impending harm. But the truth is that most people aren’t afraid of being burned, they’re afraid of being changed. Burns heal; transformation doesn’t return what it took.
Sincerity, for me, is the grounding rod, the thing that keeps intensity from mutating into chaos. Not a safeguard from pain but a structure for meaning. When someone shows up sincerely, even loss becomes legible; even endings retain dignity. Without sincerity, everything collapses into interpretation and guesswork, which is the real violence of modern dating, the way ambiguity wounds more deeply than rejection ever could. Sincerity is everything for me!
And yes, the hesitation is understandable. We live in a culture that worships autonomy with such fervour that surrender feels like self-erasure. But connection is a recalibration, the people who fear “losing themselves” in love are often the ones who never got to experience a form of intimacy that allowed expansion instead of contraction.
If anything, sincerity is the antidote to the very insecurity we try to outrun, it roots the encounter in something sturdier than hope and far more honest than performance.
Thank you for reading me with such acuity and generosity!
Wow. This will almost certainly become a legendary piece. Layer upon layer of wisdom gathered in one post. Thank you, Céline, for sharing it and making it reach more readers. And thank you, Tamara, for writing it.
I sometimes think essays like this one only resonate because they tap into a collective confusion we’ve all been hauling around like emotional luggage with a missing tag.
And if it becomes “legendary”, it will be for the simplest reason that people recognised themselves in it, even the parts they pretend to have outgrown.
Thank you, Jörgen!
Your breakdown of the modern dating maze is spot on. People keep calling it a labyrinth as if there is some hidden treasure at the end, but most of the time it feels like emotional pattern recognition mixed with self preservation. You capture that strange mix of hope, chaos and self awareness that defines dating today.
What really stands out is the clarity. You are not blaming, romanticizing or catastrophizing. You are naming the complexity in a way that feels both smart and human. It is refreshing to read someone who sees the game without becoming cynical about the players.
This reflection ties closely to what I have been exploring inside The Rebuild Project. I recently released Episode 2 of my audio series The Rebuild Journals and it looks at how the relationships we choose become mirrors for the parts of ourselves we are still learning to rebuild. If you want to listen, here is the link. https://open.substack.com/pub/danitherebuildproject/p/the-rebuild-journals-s1e02?r=2v5usz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Your piece reads like emotional navigation for a world that changes faster than the heart does. It hits the mark.
Stunning. Your sense of humor sizzles. And in an essay chock full of literary gold, the line about smelling like burnt sugar and late-night indecision lingers with me the most. Also, your thoughts make me want to go back in time and meet my wife all over again because we were surely navigating all of the above, and somehow we got to the core of each other. Likely through a whole lot of sincerity. Actually, I can’t wait to greet her this morning. I will certainly look at her in a new light after reading your lovely words.
What you wrote here is the proof that all the chaos, theory, and comedy in the essay were ultimately pointing toward something very simple. When sincerity enters the room, everything else becomes negotiable. It’s the one force that cuts through the noise because it’s disarming. People underestimate how rare it is to meet someone who shows you their inner coordinates without pre-editing them. You and your wife clearly found that rare opening early on, even if neither of you had language for it at the time.
Most long-term relationships survive on rhythm; they deepen on rediscovery. It’s amazing how one small shift in perspective can illuminate a person you already know intimately. The familiarity remains, but the perception sharpens.
If anything I wrote sent you into your morning with that kind of clarity, then the entire labyrinth was worth it.
Thank you for sharing this, Boo, your comment carries a tenderness that says more about you (and your marriage) than any essay ever could!
Another view of this from the polytheistic lens would have it that this cyberworld is the domain of the hermes/mercury archetype, whose preemptive techno-wizardry of internet communication has put us in a hermetically sealed environ immune to the work of eros and his entourage of fauns and nymphs, which would connect us most directly to the social other.
Also, Mike Brock's recent essay on the lost "tragic dimension" as well, points to where the silicon valley AI world is blocking off any remnant awareness of a reality where we can fail and fall from the high wire we are walking on, and that only there is life and freedom possible, and meaning made. The effect of such a frictionless algorithm is putting us in a state of denial and unfreedom.
So the village hasn't disappeared, nor have the gods fled. For Jung, hermes is a trickster god. He has occluded the wider world of his archetypal peers as if to say, this is my world not yours, so bud out! Harnessed in such an all encompassing cybernetic structure makes it truly difficult for other aspects of the full range of our psychological being to be involved, which is coeval with village life.
The repression of the wide bandwidth of archetypal potencies as well as the village where we actually live in a place, will return, maybe through our unfiltered inferior functions, and/or the need to work with our greater community to voice one's citizenry concerns for our overall well-being, through the mercurial haze of a misaligned monomyth by a usurper trickster god.
The last person that asked me if I wanted to date her was a nocturnal dream presence, as the dream-I was being shown the surprising possibilities of multiple dimensions in the inscapes of the psyche. The inner world is ripe for our engagement, too!
And thank you Mme. Celine Artaud, for sponsoring this head-spinning Museguided essay which has no limits to its audience, for all its relevance and erudition, and that highlights the due diligence Tamara has put into it, composing her complete and poignant array of preeminent thought! Brava!
From Turquoise & Michael, the Whidbey Island Hoopers, USA.
What you’ve described through the Hermes–Eros split is the psychic tension I feel. The modern world has elevated the messenger above the message. Hermes governs speed, exchange, mediation, trickery, thresholds, signals. Eros governs collision, embodiment, risk, and, most importantly, disruption. When Hermes runs the entire ecosystem, we end up with a civilisation of immaculate communication and impoverished connection.
But the problem isn’t that Hermes dominates. We’ve forgotten he was never meant to be a sovereign. He’s a psychopomp, a guide, a liminal figure, not a monarch. When the trickster becomes the architect of the relational world, intimacy becomes an infinite hallway of doors, cleverly labeled, rapidly accessible, but mostly leading nowhere. Eros was always meant to interrupt Hermes, not get routed through him!
Silicon Valley erased stakes. Tragedy requires consequences, and algorithms exist to remove friction. When nothing costs anything, not time, not reputation, not vulnerability, nothing can be deeply valued. We’ve made the high wire thick as a highway, then wondered why no one experiences awe while crossing it.
Your point that the village hasn’t disappeared is also crucial. It’s still there…. only muffled, anesthetised, drowned in notifications. The gods didn’t flee; we stopped listening to the frequencies where they speak. And when Hermes monopolises the bandwidth, the other archetypes get exiled to dreams, as in yours, where the psyche tries to smuggle back a multiplicity the waking world keeps flattening.
I actually think the return you predict is already underway, but through the backdoor… people are exhausted by frictionlessness. They crave inefficiency, slowness, a little sacred difficulty. They want conversations with weight, communities with edges, encounters that demand something of them. When the collective nervous system becomes this overstimulated, the inferior functions, as you beautifully put it, eventually force a compensatory renaissance.
Your dream anecdote made me smile because the psyche is the one place Hermes cannot fully hijack. Dreams refuse the notorious optimisation. They won’t stay within a single archetype, they restore plurality when waking consciousness becomes monolithic.
Both of you, Turquoise and Michael, are incredibly generous. Thank you for reading with this level of symbolic sensitivity and for bringing such a rare blend of imagination, mythic literacy, and grounded humanity into my Museguided conversations!
We are both so grateful to be a part of the readership of your incisively encircling, cultural and phenomenological Museguided scholarship that hovers over and takes deep dives into the contemporaneous now, with such a sweeping artistic and philosophical Parisian pen, all from our humble abode on this forested isle of Whidbey, in the middle of the mountain-ringed Salish Sea...pretty darn cool! Thank you Tamara, the dialogue holds the mark of excellence from the get go, all the way through!
Thank you too! Very grateful!
Interestingly our family all went to the Catholic School named Immaculate Conception.
Seems like with this bloodless techno-communication web, we are all back in the hold of the Counter-Reformation, with the AI Pope of the new Vatican of Silicon Valley?!
:))))
Well Tamara, it’s rare that an essay incises my own, profoundly instinctive feelings. And Celine’s response is written with such acuity that I cannot respond in any detailed way without risking transcription of both essays.
Whilst sounding contradictory, what I’d really like to say would require an entire evening’s discussion.
Your chronology of romantic desire & performance is unexpectedly similar to mine. And I’m one whose elevation rounds out to 5’9”. But as a man who’s exceeded 60, I consider myself fortunate that my Leo Sayeresque curls, which show no sign of disappearing, allow me to fraudulently pass as a 6’ 50yo. However, not as fortunate is the fact that I do not come across as a 50yo. In ways which you perceptively noted, & which really do matter, I’ve lost interest in frivolous, time wasting encounters, no matter how attractive she might be. And that about me is most definitely noticed by others.
When I walk down a street in Melbourne lined with desirable restaurants graced with seductive outdoor seating, Parisian-style, I notice that when I happen to engage glances with a seated patron, whether they or I are alone or in company, I am experienced enough to know that her look, often with a smile, is not about her, nor I, necessarily wishing to meet to take things further, but for the simple pleasure of knowing that it’s nice to be noticed, in a friendly & reassuring way. It happens also with males. It’s the very essence of humans being social animals. Very civilised.
I’ll finish by noting that ‘dating’ was rarely used in Australia when I was in my 20s. We used ‘seeing someone’ as the lowest tier, rising to ‘going out with someone’, for a more serious relationship. But the US influence has changed all that.
The exchanged glance that isn’t an invitation, just a momentary affirmation of mutual existence is what modern dating culture keeps trying to algorithmically replace and never succeeds at. Those micro-encounters are so civilised, they remind me that connection isn’t always a prelude; sometimes it’s simply a gesture of human recognition, a brief alignment of two inner worlds that expect nothing, demand nothing, but still leave a trace. Because we are obsessed with outcomes, these tiny, purposeless exchanges feel almost extraordinary.
And I think that’s why your experience resonates so strongly with what I wrote: the further one travels into maturity, not “age,” but maturity, the less tolerance there is for the performative aspects of romance. You start valuing coherence over spectacle, presence over potential, and the meaningful glance over the theatrical pursuit. And yes, people notice when someone carries that kind of discernment. At least I do.
I agree about “seeing someone”. It implies perception, curiosity, a mutual exploration of presence. Dating, in its current Americanised form, suggests structure, roles, expectations, the possibility of being evaluated. One is relational. The other is procedural. It’s no surprise that the more procedural the language becomes, the more people feel exhausted by the rituals attached to it.
Thank you for such a thoughtful, layered response, Russell!
I must thank you, Tamara.
In a literary sense, is there anything better than being truly understood?
Of course not! Never!
In this instance, I suspect that you understand what I’m trying to explain, if not my own personality itself, better than I do.
On reflection, I haven’t changed at all, in what I’m attracted to, & not attracted to, in others. I recall at the age of 9 or 10, finding two girls our class, very appealing, and cute, without conscious awareness of anything sexual. Somewhat differently, I found two boys more interesting company than others, one for his sense of humour, the other, (having learned years later that my mother suffered a miscarriage following my sister’s birth, & prior to mine), that he may have represented the brother I never knew.
I’m convinced that instinct is a profound influence on whom we are drawn to. It’s something we cannot change.
In that sense our destiny is foretold.
This is the part of attraction people often try to out-argue with theory but never succeed because it lives deeper than preference. It’s not something we “decide”; it’s something that reveals itself long before the adult mind arrives with explanations. Attraction could be seen as a series of choices, but in reality it’s a continuity. You felt it at 9 or 10 because the psyche was already forming its coordinates: humour, warmth, familiarity, the echo of a sibling who never arrived. Those early instincts were precursors of your relational architecture.
Most people assume desire is primarily constructed through adulthood, experience, heartbreak, pattern, but the foundation is laid far earlier, and often for reasons we don’t consciously know until much later. What you call destiny is really the psyche’s long memory. We aren’t drawn to people randomly; we’re drawn to the emotional shapes that feel like “home”, even when we can’t say why. And the fact that your attractions have stayed consistent over decades signals coherence. You haven’t betrayed your inner compass; you’ve simply grown into it.
Ohhh yes, instinct plays a far larger role than people admit; it’s often the most reliable indicator of psychological truth. Instinct is destiny in the sense that certain relational patterns are organic to who we are. The beauty is that once we understand those early imprints, attraction becomes less mysterious, not less powerful. You’re not fated in the sense of being trapped, you become recognisable to yourself.
Thank you again for sharing this reflection!
This paragraph gave me chills. I read it to C, who's trekked the labyrinth and fought the Minotaur shoulder to shoulder with me through so many years and adventures.
The one point I can add to your amazing essay is that the struggle and the journey can all be so, incredibly worth more than can be expressed.
The struggle is never a tax on love but the terrain of it. The labyrinth is the place where connection earns its meaning. Two people who’ve walked through complexity together aren’t simply bonded anymore, they are co-authors of a shared mythology. That’s a different order of intimacy.
Thank you for sharing this, M!
It was late, the paragraph I referred to was the last one. I love the imagery of the labyrinth, and equal partners navigating its challenges in good cheer.
“In your 60s, dating …. because …. life is sweeter when shared.”
Oh, yes, a sweetness tasted because I finally have just one care —- to be here.
Indeed! Thank you so much, Randolph!
In tears for 26 different reasons after reading this.
I am so moved, thank you so much! Truly!
Enlightening as usual, thank you 🙏 and to Céline for the generosity!
Thank you too, Joel!