Dating and Relationships

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    Our Messed-Up Dating Culture Gave Us Donald Trump. Let Me Explain.

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    Joe Rogan. Elon Musk. Representatives of bro culture are on the ascent, bringing with them an army of disaffected young men. But where did they come from? Many argue that a generation of men are resentful because they have fallen behind women in work and school. I believe this shift would not have been so destabilizing were it not for the fact that our society still has one glass-slippered foot in the world of Cinderella.Hundreds of years after the Brothers Grimm published their version of that classic rags-to-riches story, our cultural narratives still reflect the idea that a woman’s status can be elevated by marrying a more successful man — and a man’s diminished by pairing with a more successful woman. Now that women are pulling ahead, the fairy tale has become increasingly unattainable. This development is causing both men and women to backslide to old gender stereotypes and creating a hostile division between them that provides fuel for the exploding manosphere. With so much turmoil in our collective love lives, it’s little wonder Americans are experiencing surging loneliness, declining birthrates and — as evidenced by Donald Trump’s popularity with young men — a cascade of resentment that threatens to reshape our democracy.When we think of Prince Charming, most of us probably picture a Disney figure with golden epaulets and great hair. In the Brothers Grimm version of “Cinderella,” he is called simply “the prince,” and neither his looks nor his personality receive even a passing mention. In fact, we learn nothing about him except for the only thing that matters: He has the resources to give Cinderella a far better life than the one she is currently living. Throughout much of Western literature, this alone qualified as a happy ending, given that a woman’s security and sometimes her survival were dependent on marrying a man who could materially support her.Recently, men’s and women’s fortunes have been trending in opposite directions. Women’s college enrollment first eclipsed men’s around 1980, but in the past two decades or so this gap has become a chasm. In 2022, men made up only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds at four-year schools, and their graduation rates were lower than women’s as well. Since 2019, there have been more college-educated women in the work force than men.Cinderella may now have her own castle — single women are also exceeding single men in rates of homeownership — but she is unlikely to be scouring the village for a hot housekeeper with a certain shoe size. A 2016 study in The Journal of Marriage and Family suggests that even when economic pressure to marry up is lower, cultural pressure to do so goes nowhere. A recent paper from economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve found that since the 1960s, when women’s educational attainment and work force participation first began to surge, Americans’ preference for marrying someone of equal or greater education and income has grown significantly.Our modern fairy tales — romantic comedies — reflect this reality, promoting the fantasy that every woman should have a fulfilling, lucrative career … and also a husband who is doing just a little better than she is. In 2017, a Medium article analyzed 32 rom-coms from the 1990s and 2000s and discovered that while all starred smart, ambitious women, only four featured a woman with a higher-status job than her male love interest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Forget the Instagram Hard Launch: Are You Location-Sharing Official?

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      It’s the final frontier in digital expressions of coupledom. But for some people, it’s always going to be creepy.Niara Sterling is a D.J. living in Brooklyn who frequently travels to different cities and countries to perform in front of thousands of guests at parties, concerts and other events.In her last relationship, she shared her phone location with her girlfriend, as well as with a few close friends and family members — and didn’t think twice about it. She and her ex, a fellow female D.J., both frequently worked at night, so knowing where they each were afforded some peace of mind in case of an emergency.“God forbid something happens, you can find my location,” said Ms. Sterling, 30. “I also think I didn’t mind it because we had an honest relationship. I didn’t have anything to hide; we lived together already anyway.”Since Apple’s location-sharing app Find My debuted more than a decade ago, it has become widely used as a way not only to keep tabs on your devices, children or luggage, but also to check in on your romantic partner. But the app, which can be used to prioritize your closest friends above other acquaintances, can also complicate dynamics within friend groups.So it’s no surprise that the use of Find My — and similar location-sharing apps — is popular among those in romantic relationships. In many ways, the Find My app has become a way to signal that your relationship is official, much as users would give a partner pride of place in their Myspace Top 8, change their status on Facebook to “In a Relationship” or hard launch on Instagram.But while there are those who see Find My as a helpful tool when coordinating plans or preparing for emergencies, others find it to be controlling and intrusive.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dating App Fatigue? In Vermont, Personal Ads Still Thrive.

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      Small weekly seeks readers looking for love.Katie Flagg moved to Vermont when she was 18 to attend Middlebury College and fell in love at first sight — with the state. But after she graduated and moved to a farmhouse in the middle of rural Addison County, she had a sudden pang of doubt: Would she live there alone forever?It was 2008. Dating sites were still a bit taboo, and she wasn’t sure how else to meet people in a place where they were not many people around.So she turned to a publication that many Vermonters have long turned to when they were looking for love: Seven Days, an alternative weekly that is one of the last bastions of newspaper personal ads.For decades, the ads have been reliably quirky, surprisingly effective and, well, very Vermont. Nowadays, Seven Days has a thriving online personals section to go with the print version. In a recent entry, one man in his 70s boasted of his several hundred maple sugar taps.Ms. Flagg’s online profile in the Seven Days personals section featured a photo of her in sunglasses and a “faux hawk.” It caught the attention of Colin Davis, whose username on the site was “patternlanguage.”That piqued Ms. Flagg’s interest. “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction,” a 1977 book on design that has a cult following, was one of her favorites. She also spied a Middlebury College landmark in the background of one of his photos.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tiny Love Stories: ‘Filled With Warm, Sugary Feelings’

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      Modern Love in miniature, featuring reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.Brian ReaTaking the Bitter With the SweetOn a recent night after I moved out of our home in Moab, my ex and I went to a diner and ordered a mysterious item called the Cinnamon Roll Rage. As we dismantled layers of pastry, caramel and pecans, I thought it was a fitting end. Like the dessert, I was angry but also filled with warm, sugary feelings for this man who was doing everything he could to blunt the pain of his decision to end our four-year relationship. Alas, life is not always sweet, but when we treat each other well, it can taste far less bitter. — Amanda HeidtThe Moab Diner’s Cinnamon Roll Rage in all its glory. His Main SqueezeWeeks after her second marriage, I asked my mother how things were going. She replied, “It’s great; we’re still in the honeymoon phase.” How would she know when the honeymoon phase was over? When the toothpaste tube she had brought with her to their new shared home was empty, she joked. Six months later, she expressed surprise at how long a tube of toothpaste lasts: “I never really paid attention before.” My stepfather, an engineer, had overheard our conversation and had been secretly refilling the toothpaste tube every few days for months! — Ann Baker PepeMy mother, Lois, and my stepfather, Al, on their wedding day.Proust Was RightOdds of winning this footrace were not favorable. Flights, freeways and I.C.U. visitation rules. I hurtled through flashbacks of our visits, calls, letters, emails and texts since Donna and I met at college and then never lived in the same city. When I arrived at Donna’s bedside, the universe slowed. “I made it,” I whispered. A long look. A wan but beautiful smile. Everyone who had to be gathered had gathered, and everything to be said was said. Within hours, my friend of 56 years was gone. So yes, Monsieur Proust, space and time are indeed measured by the heart. — Gwendolyn W. WilliamsOutside my mother’s house when Donna, on the right, was visiting me in Los Angeles. Worth the SneezeJordan and I matched on Hinge — she in Ohio; I in Kentucky. An attorney with two dogs plastered on nearly every one of her profile pictures, Jordan was a woman wildly out of my league, or so I thought. Blown away by us “matching,” I was afraid to tell her about my moderate allergies to dogs. Once our Hinge messaging escalated to text, I determined it time to spill the beans. A year later, I’m a proud dog owner of two rescues for whom I take daily allergy medication. Sometimes, you get three loves for the price of one. — Kale VogtThe best photo you’re going to get of our little family. Jordan is on the right.See more Tiny Love Stories at nytimes.com/modernlove. Submit yours at nytimes.com/tinylovestories.Want more from Modern Love? Watch the TV series; sign up for the newsletter; or listen to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or Google Play. We also have swag at the NYT Store and two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.” More

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      ‘Nobody Wants This’ Pits Jewish Women Against ‘Shiksas.’ Nobody Wins.

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      The derisive word for a male gentile is shegetz. I didn’t know the term until I married one. Even though my family is 100 percent Jewish and my brother took a DNA test to prove it, up to that point, I had only ever heard the female equivalent of the word: shiksa.When I heard my community of mostly secular Jews use the word shiksa growing up, it wasn’t really used as a slur; it was used as a referent for the conventional American ideal of beauty. It was understood that as Jewish women, we purportedly existed outside this ideal. We were assumed to be emasculating scolds, obligations men were saddled with rather than women to be desired.Our looks were all wrong and in need of expensive plastic surgery or hair treatments to even attempt to measure up. The feeling was summed up by a line from a throwaway character, apparently post-makeover, in a Season 2 episode of “Sex and the City” that first aired in 1999: “Well, you know, my boyfriend and I were really compatible, except for one thing. He liked thin, blond WASP-y types, so … now I am.”That’s because the shiksa stereotype looms large in American pop culture as an object of Jewish male desire. It was largely constructed in the mid-20th century by Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. Writing in 2013 for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Menachem Kaiser described the stereotype succinctly:By the 1980s, what I’ll call the Allenesque Jew/shiksa split was entrenched: Jewish = nonathletic, brainy, neurotic, pasty, dark-haired, profoundly unhealthy parental relationship, usually from the New York area; shiksa = healthy, WASP-y, carefree, blond, supportive (if judgmental) parents, from the Midwest or from a home that might as well be in the Midwest.But it’s not 1980, 1999 or even 2013 anymore. It’s no longer shocking or novel when a Jew dates or marries outside his or her religion — 61 percent of Jews who have married since 2010 are intermarried, according to a 2021 Pew Research report. Among non-Orthodox Jews, that number is 72 percent.That’s why I found the experience of watching the new Netflix series “Nobody Wants This” — which was originally titled “Shiksa” — to be both off-putting and bizarre. The show seems to have been beamed in from the past century in both its depiction of Jew-gentile relations and also its gender politics.Set in Los Angeles, “Nobody Wants This” is about a blond sex-and-relationships podcaster, Joanne (Kristen Bell), who falls for a rabbi, Noah (Adam Brody). The dramatic tension comes entirely from Joanne’s shiksa status (light spoilers ahead). The majority of Noah’s circle is hostile to Joanne from the jump, particularly his mother (Tovah Feldshuh), his sister-in-law, Esther (Jackie Tohn), and his ex-girlfriend Rebecca (Emily Arlook).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Singles in Spain Look for Love in the Grocery Store, With Pineapples as Prop

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      How the Spanish grocery chain Mercadona got a reputation as an unlikely dating hub, with its upside-down pineapples as props.@yosoyvivylin via InstagramAs a scorching summer draws to its close in Spain, love is in the air in an unexpected place — in air-conditioned supermarket aisles. But only for an hour a day, and with an unusual accessory: an upturned pineapple in your shopping cart to let fellow lonely hearts know you’re available.The comedian Vivy Lin is being credited in the Spanish news media for starting the fad, after she and a friend, Carla Alarcón, recorded themselves shopping for groceries in Seville a few weeks ago.In the video, Ms. Lin said she had noticed that there was a specific window of time — between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. — when the aisles in Spain’s largest superstore, Mercadona, are full of single men and women wandering aimlessly without buying much at all.Ms. Lin winked at the camera and concluded there was only one thing they could be doing: “ligando,” which roughly translates to looking for a date. With a cheeky grin, she coined a new phrase, “the dating hour in Mercadona,” and uploaded her video to TikTok.Other users took it from there. A brunette dressed to kill applied bright red lipstick and posed beside stacked shelves. Girls in sexy summer shorts and T-shirts cruised the aisles and goofed around beside the wines. A young man in a sharp suit and tousled hair smiled coyly and raised an eyebrow at fellow shoppers.“I see it as being a phenomenon of humor more than of love,” Ms. Lin, the comedian, said in a telephone interview, adding, “I think the hookup pretext has been an excuse for people to go out and have fun, to make memes and record videos.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      As Lopez Files for Divorce From Affleck, Should You Reunite With an Ex-Partner?

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      As Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck show, rekindling an old romance is risky. We asked couples counselors what you should ask before diving back in.When the superstars Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck married in 2022, decades after calling off their initial engagement, it seemed like the stuff of a romantic Hollywood blockbuster.“Love is beautiful,” Ms. Lopez wrote after the couple’s Las Vegas nuptials. “Love is kind. And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.”But Ms. Lopez filed for divorce from Mr. Affleck on Tuesday after two years of marriage, ending months of frenzied media speculation about their shaky union, and highlighting a decidedly unromantic truth: Reuniting with an ex-partner does not guarantee a happy ending.“I have certainly seen people who are in long-term happy relationships who got back together after having broken up,” said Elizabeth Earnshaw, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Philadelphia. “I would say that is the exception to the rule.”Many couples counselors said they recommended taking an almost clinical approach to reuniting with an ex — even (or especially) if you are swept up in the thrill of rediscovering old passions. Here are four questions therapists recommend asking.1. Do we both understand why we broke up?That is a “laughably obvious” question to start with, admitted Lisa Marie Bobby, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Denver and the founder of Growing Self, a counseling and coaching service. But if you and your partner cannot both articulate a clear answer without defensiveness or tension, that is a red flag, she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sunday Read: ‘Online Dating After 50 Can Be Miserable. But It’s Also Liberating.’

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      Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeWhen Maggie Jones’s marriage collapsed after 23 years, she was devastated and overwhelmed. She was in her 50s, with two jobs, two teenage daughters and one dog. She didn’t consider dating. She had no time, no emotional energy. But then a year passed. One daughter was off at college, the other increasingly independent. After several more months went by, she started to feel a sliver of curiosity about what kind of men were out there and how it would feel to date again. The last time she dated was 25 years ago, and even then, she fell into relationships mostly with guys from high school, college, parties, work. Now every man she knew was either married, too young, too old or otherwise not a good fit.That meant online dating — the default mode not just for the young but also for people Ms. Jones’s age. Her only exposure had been watching her oldest daughter, home from college one summer, as she sat on her bed rapidly swiping through guy after guy — spending no more than a second or two on each.Ms. Jones tells her story of online dating in later adulthood, and what she learned.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      How to Avoid a Drawn-Out Divorce

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      The sticking points in a breakup aren’t the same for every couple, but lawyers who have brokered countless divorces have some advice for keeping things simple.Ask any divorce lawyer: The only people who control how long a divorce takes are the two parties going through the divorce.Although many divorces are finalized through mediation, a process in which lawyers try to broker a resolution without having to go to court, those negotiations can sometimes take years, prolonged by things like child custody battles, when emotions can be expected to run high. Perhaps less explicable is when the holdup arises over the splitting of assets like homes, vintage cars or art collections.About six years after they were declared legally single, the formerly married actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt continue to be legally entangled. The reason: a French vineyard they bought while together; Mr. Pitt is suing Ms. Jolie for having sold her stake in the property without his consent, according to reports by Us Weekly and People. Ms. Jolie is asking him to drop the suit so the family can heal.Although your average split isn’t likely to be held up by a fight over a winery, many couples find that certain jointly held assets can be sticking points in the event of a breakup or divorce. So what precautions — if any — are couples taking to avoid a bruising battle after they’ve decided to part ways?Alan Feigenbaum, a divorce lawyer in New York City, has seen divorce proceedings drag out over the division of valuable art collections. But things can become absurd, he said, when negotiations are dragged out over property that isn’t even particularly valuable.“Some of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen,” he added, “is arguing over who gets to keep their children’s toys.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More