The One Hard Truth About Dating That Young People Often Learn Too Late
The One Hard Truth About Dating That Young People Often Learn Too Late
I learned something watching Netflix
The One Hard Truth About Dating That Young People Often Learn Too Late
Watch season 4, episode 4 of Black Mirror on Netflix - Hang the DJ.
Everything you need to know about dating lies within.
The episode starts with two people, matched by a dating app, meeting for dinner.
Then things get real.
In true Black Mirror fashion, the plot takes a technology designed to make our lives more convenient (like dating apps) and turns it into a devil’s curse, unraveling the darkest caverns of reality.
Instead of letting the singles decide if they want to continue the relationship, the app sends them an update with a specific timeline for how long the relationship will last.
12 hours, 3 months, or 37 years.
Who decides the timeline? Computer code, I guess.
No spoilers, but the episode forces us to face a hard truth about dating: That most relationships are temporary.
Older generations already know this.
It’s the young that come to this realization only after heartbreak.
So let’s talk about the impermanent nature of relationships.
You Never Really “Have” Someone
At best, we will have a partner for life.
Even then, that person was never really ours in the first place. Only placed in our trust.
The writer Julia Baird calls this the beauty of the ephemeral. In her book Phosphorescence, she parallels the impermanence of all things to street art—a moving and vibrant art form that thrives in the temporary.
An artist canvasses their idea on a public wall or abandoned building. Newspapers write about it, critics debate it, and people come from all over to take selfies.
The excitement reaches a climax, and then, a contractor demolishes the building.
As Julia writes:
”If we accept that flowering is by nature a fleeting occurrence, then we are more likely to recognize each bud as a victory, each blossom as a triumph.”
That’s the ephemeral beauty of relationships. Instead of worrying about an expiration date—guilty about the past or dreaming about the future — impermanence helps us live for the moment and find joy in relationships while we experience it.
We Get Way Too Attached When We Believe Relationships Are Permanent
Attachment is the denial of the temporary nature of things.
We fight desperately to hold on to the things we love and pour all our empathy, strength, and self into a relationship until we’re sucked dry.
Only in the aftermath do we realize we were fighting the universe.
Newsflash, you won’t win that battle.
We blow up things in our heads when we get attached. Good or bad. We fall madly in love and when the relationship ends, we are devasted proportionally — like a drug addict coming off a high.
When you accept impermanence, you see relationships for what they are. Not a fairy tale or a rom-com—but a life to be shared, a copilot, a person to turn to for hope and support.
Relationships Are Mostly Outside of Your Control— and That’s Wonderful
Black Mirror goes about it in an ominous way, but it does teach a valuable lesson.
The lesson: That relationships are mostly outside of your control.
In philosophy, impermanence is a constant theme for that reason. Nothing good or bad lasts forever so it’s best too not to get high on any one person or thing.
Marcus Aurelius says we must “strip those things of the legend that encrusts it.”
Now! That does not mean you should become cold-hearted and shallow.
It means for how much love and empathy you give others, you need to hold an equal amount for yourself.
It is in that equation, I believe, you will find joy and peace in your relationships.
As the American writer, Anne Lamott wrote:
“Hope and peace have to include a certain impermanence to everything, of the certain obliteration of all we love, beauty, and light and huge marred love.”