If you’ve ever scrolled through social media, sat through a family dinner or had to endure a ‘situationship,’ surely you have been exposed to the common diagnosis of modern dating as a moral failure. It’s always the same arguments: the newer generation is impatient, nobody wants to put in the work, everyone is incapable of commitment and they’re all addicted to novelty.
In this telling, the past — defined with grandparents who have been together for 50 years, at least — becomes a romantic reference point, a cultural before-and-after image. Relationships “lasted” then. Marriage “meant something.” People stayed, endured and built. Now, supposedly, they leave at the first inconvenience, treat partners as disposable and confuse boundaries with avoidance.
This narrative is less of an observation than an ideology. It converts the material conditions that once held relationships together into evidence of personal virtue, then treats longevity as proof of love and stability as proof of character. Most importantly, it misidentifies what changed.
The most consequential shift is not that younger people forgot how to care. It is that dependence — especially women’s dependence on men — has weakened enough to alter the terms of partnership. When relationships stop being necessary, they stop being guaranteed. What gets described as a “commitment crisis” is often the result of changed incentives rather than degraded values.
Historically, marriage functioned as infrastructure as much as intimacy. It was a system of shared resources and delegated roles: housing, legitimacy, childcare, labour and social protection consolidated into a single institution. Love and romance existed inside it, sometimes intensely. However, the stability of marriage was never built solely on emotional fulfillment: it relied heavily on the cost of exit.
In many contexts, a woman leaving a marriage faced steep penalties: financial insecurity, social stigma, diminished status, legal and practical barriers, and in most cases, a narrowed range of economic options. Men, however, depended on women for domestic labour, caregiving and emotional management — forms of dependence that remained culturally invisible because they were feminized and treated as natural rather than economic contributions.
That’s not to say that this arrangement could not be affectionate, or that love and marriage are all just oppressors of women, but rather the structures that define love and marriage are coercive. When divorce is stigmatized, and single life is economically and socially punishing, relationships last. Longevity is not automatically love, and sometimes, it is simply the price of leaving that kept couples together.
The contemporary cultural script that “nobody wants to work on relationships anymore” relies on collapsing this reality into a moral tale, suggesting that tolerating dissatisfaction is evidence of maturity and that endurance is proof of devotion. But there is a difference between working through conflict and working through misery. Treating the past as an era of superior commitment often means treating constrained choice as a romantic ideal.
As dependence weakens, the meaning of commitment changes. Commitment can no longer be quietly enforced by economics and social stigma, it must be actively sustained by mutual desire, reciprocity and emotional reward. This shift does not make relationships “worse,” but it does make them more contingent. Optional bonds are always more fragile than mandatory ones because they must continuously justify themselves. In a world where more people can survive alone, partnership becomes something that is chosen rather than an expectation.
This is the logic beneath what is often vaguely described as “commitment issues.” Shorter relationships, higher rates of breakup, delayed marriage and declining fertility rates are frequently read as signs of immaturity or selfishness. But many of these trends are compatible with a simpler explanation: the reduced necessity of staying.
When leaving becomes financially feasible and socially acceptable, individuals become less likely to tolerate chronic disrespect, unaddressed incompatibility or persistent emotional neglect, which is then interpreted as impatience by those who treat endurance as a baseline virtue.
It can also be understood as refusal to participate in a partnership model that historically asked women in particular to absorb disproportionate suffering as the cost of stability. Where dependence creates endurance by default, autonomy creates selectivity by design. And selectivity can look like failure when measured against an era that was never structured for emotional equality in the first place.
The cultural nostalgia for “how relationships used to be” does more than misremember the past. It supplies moral language for a rising contemporary conservative impulse: the desire to restore old standards for women under the guise of restoring love.
The story usually begins innocently, as a complaint about dating culture and quickly travels in a predictable direction where the problem is that women “don’t need men,” women “don’t respect men” and women “have unrealistic standards.” From there, the conclusion becomes a soft call for “traditional” gender roles, reframed not as hierarchy but as harmony: men should lead, women should soften, relationships need clearer roles and the past offered more stability.
This is not always expressed as explicit politics. It often arrives as aesthetics and lifestyle rhetoric. Contemporary “traditional femininity” and tradwife-adjacent content do not announce themselves as a demand to roll back rights. They are presented as relief: a soft life, a return to simplicity, a rejection of burnout and an alternative to modern loneliness.
The underlying promise is stability, where stability is framed as something that can be achieved by reviving dependence: women leaning into submission, men leaning into a provider identity and gender roles that are treated as natural rather than negotiated. The old logic is repackaged as romance where need becomes devotion, inequality becomes balance and endurance becomes love.
The ideological function is clear. If the reason relationships lasted in the past is reinterpreted as superior values rather than constrained options, then the solution to modern instability becomes a return to the conditions that made leaving difficult.
In a context where dependence is less enforceable, the incentive to stay shifts. If partnership is not required for survival or social legitimacy, its value must be internal rather than institutional. Companionship, affection, shared meaning and mutual care become the only real reason to stay. That is not a downgrade of love — it’s a redefinition of what counts as a tolerable relationship.
A relationship that lasts because it is chosen is different from one that lasts because leaving is punished. The modern era is frequently accused of failing at commitment when it may be doing something else: stripping commitment of coercive scaffolding, making relationships less durable in the aggregate, but potentially more honest at the level of individual lives.
The panic of younger generations being “bad at relationships” mistakes the disappearance of dependence for the erosion of romance. It treats optionality as weakness, mourns an era when stability could be guaranteed by constraint and then brands that constraint as virtue. The complaint about patience comes from a deeper discomfort: not everyone can be compelled to stay anymore. And when staying is no longer mandatory, what remains is the only durable basis for intimacy — an ongoing desire to be there.