Love, Throughline
Throughline
NPR
4.6 • 16.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2024
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The data backs this up. Despite the fact that meeting someone today doesn't require much more than swiping on your phone, people who are looking for long-term relationships are lonelier than ever.
Why is it like this? How did love – this thing that's supposed to be beautiful, magical, transformative – turn into a neverending slog? We went searching for answers, and we found them in surprising places. On today's show: a time-hopping, philosophical journey into the origins of modern love.
Correction: An earlier version of this episode incorrectly said that the Jena Romantics shared a house for 10 years. In fact they lived and worked in close proximity, occasionally cohabitating, for approximately five years
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions. |
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| 0:17.0 | Every year around this time, my inner Larry David comes popping out because of Valentine's Day. |
| 0:25.5 | Now I know I'm not original in feeling this way. |
| 0:28.6 | But Valentine's Day is kind of like the worst of the modern manufactured holidays because it's a day when we're all |
| 0:35.2 | reminded of ideal love stories when we're pushed to express romantic love in scripted ways |
| 0:41.5 | where it kind of just all feels forced. But for most of my life I |
| 0:46.1 | think this was just me being a cromogen, just being who I am. I don't think I |
| 0:50.7 | started to actually understand the deeper reasons for why I dislike Valentine's Day so much until a few years ago. |
| 0:59.0 | I suddenly by myself single after separating from my partner, partner who I share a child with. |
| 1:05.7 | I'll spare you all the details but basically after I figured out how to adjust to my new reality |
| 1:11.1 | to co-parent etc I started thinking about dating again. Now imagine |
| 1:16.8 | I'm in my 30s the last time I dated was before dating apps existed and I'm |
| 1:22.1 | going into it with my 20th century sensibilities. |
| 1:25.0 | In the beginning it was brutal. I couldn't figure out how to match with anyone. My |
| 1:30.8 | profile was terrible. I remember sharing my profile with Run and her just laughing. |
| 1:36.9 | It felt so weird swiping on faces like I was shopping for a new drum set. Sometimes dates would be awkward, probably mostly because of me. Other times, people would just disappear. Sometimes I'd want to disappear. |
| 1:50.0 | Of course, it wasn't all bad. I met some amazing people, but I always felt like something was off about all of it. |
| 1:58.0 | I felt like the search for a partner had been twisted and commodified into this detached consumer activity, kind of like what we |
| 2:06.0 | did to love with Valentine's Day. |
| 2:09.1 | And I really wanted to know if other people experienced it the same way I did. So I thought why don't we ask all of you, |
... |
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