How Dating & Relationships have Evolved in the Last 20 Years

Making my way through my notes from Esther Perel’s Sessions conference, here’s what she and the panel of Dan Savage, Diana Adams, and Dr. Keisha Siriboe discussed. There was also a whole amazing conversation about grief, activism, and political rage that I’m not going to go into here, because I wanted to focus on what’s happening in the therapy and coaching rooms.

20 Years of Connection: What Changed, What Didn’t, What’s Next.

The clinical shift nobody trained us for

Esther named that we've spent the last few decades separating things that used to be fused. For example, sex used to be bound to reproduction. Today, we’ve separated reproduction from sex (contraception); sexuality from reproduction (gay couples can adopt or use surrogates), and more recently, we’ve separated anatomy from gender. Not to mention marriage equality and non-monogamous relationships entering mainstream discourse. Dan called it the

“queering of the straights, and the straightening of the queers.”

These are brilliant and significant steps forward, and most coach and therapy training isn’t preparing practitioners for the very real new issues our clients are facing as a result.

Once sex isn't obligation anymore, once it's not the thing you owe your marriage, it has to become something else. It has to become wanted. And wanting is a completely different muscle than complying. Esther put it simply: desire is owning the wanting. You can make someone have sex. You can never make them want it. Which means wanting is sovereignty. It's freedom. It's also, for a lot of people, the part of themselves they were never given permission to develop.

So the questions I actually want to be asking (and the ones I wish more practitioners asked) aren't "are you still having sex." That question is DOA.. Better questions are “What does wanting feel like in your body? What shuts you down, and what wakes you up? Where did you learn that wanting was dangerous, or selfish, or not for people like you?”

Dan Savage said he gets letters constantly from people who write "I'm in therapy but I can't talk to my therapist about this." That's exactly why I’m so glad there’s people like Martha Kauppi who trains others in how to bring up sex in the consulting room safely.

Technology as the third person in the room

2006 gave us Facebook, Twitter, Google buying YouTube, and cameras showing up on our phones. 20 years later, many people are still acting like this is new information, when actually it now constitutes the architecture of how we meet, flirt, and fall for people.

But then there's the paradox of choice. Four kinds of mustard, everyone leaves with a jar. Four hundred kinds, and nobody leaves with anything. Swipe culture gave us four hundred kinds of mustard and called it romance.

There's also a much messier layer post-MeToo, which is that we still expect men to make the first move, but we've made the cost of guessing wrong so high that a lot of men would rather make no move at all. The panel said it plainly: the first move is always a guess. More so, it has to be allowed to be a guess, and treated as an ask rather than a lunge, or we end up with a culture where it's never okay to approach anyone unless you already knew the answer.

I don't think the answer is nostalgia for a pre-internet world. Diana pointed out something true and hopeful, that queer kids who used to grow up thinking they were the only one in existence can now find their people on the same night they realize who they are. Technology can facilitate or it can isolate, and most of us are doing both depending on context, so it’s up to us to become aware which one we're leaning into.

Dan used an analogy I loved: technology is like alcohol. It can lubricate connection, and lower the walls enough to let something in. It can also isolate you completely and ruin you. Same substance, wildly different outcomes depending on how you're using it.

Why friction is the thing, not the obstacle to the thing

If you’ve been following Esther as long as I have, I’m sure you’ve heard her recite this formula from Jack Morin:

attraction plus obstacle equals excitement.

You need the obstacle, it's the engine.

Which means in long-term love, when we finally engineer total safety, total predictability, zero friction, we get confused about why it stopped being turn-on. Well, safety was never the thing that made it exciting in the first place.

When hubby and I were dating, half the charge was that we didn't fully know each other yet, there was risk in it, we were each other's adventure. You can't manufacture that particular flavor of risk again after two decades together. But you can create new obstacles on purpose. You can go do the thing that scares you a little, together.

I don’t usually work with clients in the dating stages much, but there was a suggestion on the panel I really liked: stop treating dates like sterile data collection where you report back afterward on whether it "worked." A new partner isn’t something to “launch” after they’ve passed a series of tests. Bring the person into your actual life instead, the dinner with friends you were already going to, the hike you were already planning. Let it be as real as possible instead of an audition.

For people who've been together a long time and want the spark back, the honest answer isn't more comfort. It's more risk, on purpose, together. Doing what you enjoy gives you friendship. Wanting excitement means doing something that goes past your threshold, with the person who already knows you, which is its own particular kind of brave.

So.

Society changed, technology changed, and relational problems evolved alongside those changes.

We’re still wired for connection, we still want to feel wanted, and we’re still struggling to balance between “me” and “we.”

The panel didn’t have a neat “what’s next” wrap-up, but to me, the way forward is taking a conscious, systemic, and developmental approach. The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives, so if that’s not worth being intentional about our actions, beliefs, and emotions, I don’t know what is.