This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Ask young adults about love in this day and age, and their diagnosis is bleak: They live in an individualistic society, dating has been reduced to an algorithm, and a generation is afraid to commit. This paradox was the subject of Jules Pector-Lallemand's doctoral research, supervised by Université de Montréal sociology professor Barbara Thériault.
An article based on the Ph.D. dissertation is now published in Sexuality & Culture. Pector-Lallemand followed 41 young adults ages 18 to 35 in Montreal, Paris and New York over a four-year period, and 13 of them more intensively for a year and a half. The sample was diverse: heterosexual and LGBTQ+, monogamous and nonmonogamous, couples and singles.
He also took a job as a dishwasher in a Montreal bar to observe the "grammar of gestures"—a hand on the lower back, a head resting on a shoulder—and cross-referenced these with the narratives collected in the interviews. The first thing that struck Pector-Lallemand in the course of his fieldwork was the pervasive disillusionment with dating apps. He often heard the same refrain, frequently expressed in commercial similes: "Dating apps are like fast food, like a supermarket; I hate them—it's all about appearance.
Things used to be different." Some participants self-diagnosed their neuroses: "I've developed a fear of commitment, rejection phobia, an anxious attachment style." The prevailing pessimism echoes French–Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz's argument about the decline of romantic love in books such as "Why Love Hurts" (2012) and "The End of Love" (2019). Pector-Lallemand disagrees. "The statistics show that the proportion of people in relationships in Canada was roughly the same in 2021 as it was in 1921, and divorce rates have been declining steadily since the late 1980s," he observed.
"The numbers are often ignored because they don't fit the gloomy narrative about our tawdry age and its unkindness to love." As he burrowed beneath those generalizations, Pector-Lallemand noticed a paradox. When he asked his pessimistic participants to tell their own stories, the tone changed dramatically and their skepticism gave way to accounts resembling fairy tales, each with a consistent structure. Pector-Lallemand identified three recurring stages in the love stories he collected: the miracle, heroism and healing.
Respondents said they weren't looking for love—or were even wary of it—when they met their soul mate. Whether it was via a dating app, through friends or by sheer chance, it happened in spite of themselves. "No one explicitly said it was fate, a somewhat dated term that may seem ridiculous today, but fate was always there in the subtext," said Pector-Lallemand.
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