I asked ChatGPT to write me a love story recently. It took 12 seconds to distill all human knowledge – every romantic epic, Petrarchan sonnet and psychology.com listicle – into a six-paragraph narrative, in which Mia and Elias meet on a dating app, go for a walk in Borough Market and live happily ever after.
Setting aside for a moment the fact that no self-respecting Londoner would go on a first date to Borough Market (now the sole preserve of FoodTok micro-influencers), it was a work of such stultifying banality that I had to ask the robot to explain its reasoning. This is what it gave me: ‘The story suggests that, despite all the digital intricacies and illusions that characterise modern relationships, there’s still a deep human longing for genuine connection.’
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And, OK, I guess there’s something in this – although, as we reach the midpoint of the decade, having survived a global pandemic together, the way we express our ‘longing for genuine connection’ has never been less banal.
For some, this means a retreat into patriarchy and heteronormativity, while others are redefining the way they commit, in a bid to recreate society from the ground up. Equally, while some crave the lucidity of sober sex, others use substances to bond them to their lovers. This snapshot of modern love is taken against a backdrop of imperilled reproductive rights, growing unease with Big Tech’s reach and the rise of far-right ideologies that threaten to reduce the role of women in public life.
In her 2019 book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, the theorist Adrienne Maree Brown explored the ramifications of a world in which pleasure and sex could be core tenets of a type of activism centred around love, fulfilment, connection and joy. Rather than focus our love on a single person, or a family unit, what if we loved with abandon? What if we prioritised feeling good about ourselves and put pleasure at the centre of our lives?
It’s a type of thinking that is gaining support ‘because as a society, we’re ready to embrace the radical parts of pleasure – to feel good about and in our own bodies, despite pressure to the contrary’, says award-winning author and sex educator Ruby Rare. ‘Pleasure is about embodiment. It’s about agency. It’s about fun and play. And I think it’s a valid way of fighting against the disconnection and apathy that our modern, tech-addicted lives can create.’
Welcome to the era of radical love.
MEET-CUTES ARE BACK
Three thousand people applied for the most recent Dinner for One Hundred supper club. Dreamt up by twenty-something Londoners Jake Bucknall and Jacob Stuttard, it’s a chance for 100 single strangers to sit down to a meal together. Its popularity has become such that the organisers recently had to implement a ballot system for tickets.
In New York, a similar story: the founders of a new dating service came up with an algorithm for matching people based on shared values (using a survey designed by Stanford students), but instead of deploying the technology via yet another app, they set up parties where singles could meet their matches in real life. The twist was that no one would be told who their perfect match was until the end of the evening, turning the whole thing – according to New York-based writer Abby Balter – ‘into a game of Guess Who’. In the year since launching, Matchbox parties have gained 100,000 followers on Instagram and hosted sold-out pop-ups across the US.
From run clubs oversaturated with horny singles to literary salons dedicated to erotic exploration, there have never been more opportunities to meet a partner in real life. Meanwhile, ill-feeling towards dating apps seems to have reached an all-time high (and indeed, the number of people using them has fallen: according to UK watchdog Ofcom, between 2023 and 2024, Tinder lost 600,000 users, Hinge users fell by 131,000 and Bumble declined by 368,000). Does this mean that we’re finally ready to throw the apps onto the scrapheap of modernity and herald a new Golden Age of singles’ mixers and meet-cutes? Well, not quite.
Emma-Louise Boynton, writer and founder of Sex Talks, explains: ‘I think when people hate on dating apps, the issue isn’t the apps themselves, but rather the general feeling of technological overwhelm. Being chronically online means we’re overexposed – too many people, too many conversations, too many news stories. It’s just too much of everything. In that headspace, the apps feel more stressful than they are.’
Last year, Melbourne-based brand strategist Eugene Healey – whose videos decoding the cultural zeitgeist regularly go mega-viral on TikTok – predicted that in 2025, IRL would become a status symbol, while being ‘tech-addicted’ will be seen as a ‘low-status trait’. As he explained: ‘Everywhere we look, our online spaces have become increasingly hostile, and now we treat the internet as something we just have to be on… Meanwhile, Big Tech has transformed you into a product, a blood bank where most people are resigned to having their attention and their entire lives harvested for data…’ Yikes.
As Rachel Thompson, author of The Love Fix, points out though, dating apps probably aren’t going anywhere – they are useful. ‘I think it’s more that people will supplement apps with real-life events, seeing the digital as just one string to their dating bow.’
ARE YOU A RELATIONSHIP ANARCHIST?
Twenty-nine-year-old Londoner Lou came out as a relationship anarchist to his parents last year. ‘I think they found it quite confusing,’ he says, explaining his anti-hierarchical approach: rather than prioritising one partner above all others, he gives equal importance to friends, lovers and companions. He’s part of a growing community that is rejecting monogamy and marriage in favour of alternative relationship structures.
Award-winning polyamory educator and writer Leanne Yau argues that there are two factors that have led to this big sexual switch-up: ‘The queer-rights movement paved the way for more acceptance of alternative relationship structures. Because when you start to question whether a relationship has to be between a man and a woman, or whether sex has to be aligned with gender, other aspects of relationships also come into question, like whether monogamy really is the best structure out there.’
Secondly, she explains, the pandemic was a period of reset for many people. ‘It was such an isolating time for a lot of us – I think it made us better understand the value of having multiple intimate connections, and intimacy doesn’t have to mean sex and romance. This huge upswing in interest in non-monogamy seems to me a symptom of the fact that people saw the pitfalls in prioritising one romantic partner and hinging all of your hopes, dreams and needs on that one person for the rest of your life.’
For Lou, relationship anarchy means ‘creating and curating intimacy’ based on what he needs in each moment. ‘I work really hard to be there for my friends and partners whenever they need me, and they do the same for me – it’s just that we see ourselves as equally important in one another’s lives. So I don’t call anyone a “primary” partner. It’s more like we’re all in a network together, and we’re all striving to live as connected, intimate individuals, without labels and rules.’
From an economic standpoint, hard times have long been associated with higher rates of break-ups (numerous studies have found that as unemployment rates go up, so do rates of divorce) – and may also be contributing to a loosening of relationship boundaries. In a pressure-cooker environment, we’re simply less likely to take the risk of going all-in with a partner who could take half our savings with them when they go.
Lou lives in a warehouse ‘commune’ with 18 other people. The reason he ‘came out’ to his parents is because he sees relationship anarchy as a profoundly politicised choice. ‘To me, valuing the people in my life as individuals and rejecting the social codes and hierarchies that go with monogamy or polyamory is a step towards creating a new kind of society. Anarchy isn’t about chaos… It’s about creating more equality by moving away from the structures that keep people oppressed.’
In everyday dating parlance, this means he’s seeing and sleeping with ‘about six different people – but it’s all really chill’. Lou’s case is probably more radical than most but, as Ruby Rare, author of The Non-Monogamy Playbook, points out: ‘Nowadays we’re all embracing relationship anarchy more than we realise.’
In 2025, it is increasingly normal to, as Rare says, ‘prioritise your friends and romantic partners equally, and to cherish the family that you build as much as the family that you’re born into’. Rates of marriage are declining globally – in the UK, the number of unmarried 25-to-35-year-olds has doubled in the past three decades, while younger generations are more likely to say that they never want to marry. At the same time, more of us than ever are living communally – maybe not with 18 others, but sharing with flatmates into our thirties and forties – all of which changes the way we structure our intimate relationships.
OR DO YOU PREFER THE SOFT LIFE?
As traditional relationship structures have been reconfigured in some quarters, in others, the heteronormative ideal has re-established itself with force. From the ‘trad wives’ of TikTok, who post highly aestheticised versions of stay-at-home motherhood to millions of followers, to the women pining after a ‘man in finance, with a trust fund’, interest in the 2.4 family, with a husband who takes care of the bills and a wife who takes care of the home, seems to have skyrocketed.
‘The concept of levelling up your socioeconomic status through marriage is nothing new. It’s been around for at least 3,000 years,’ says Thompson. ‘I think TikTok and YouTubers have played a huge role in essentially rebranding this as something empowering, which I find quite concerning. But if we want to understand why more young women are looking to “level up” by “marrying well”, we need to take a look at the economic conditions that are making women feel this is their only option of leading a comfortable life.’
Indeed, underpinning all of this is a malaise brought on by a broken economic system. Wage stagnation since the 2008 financial crash has left the majority of under-40s unable to buy a home without significant help from parents. What’s more, women in particular, who are over-represented in lower-paying professions and more likely to take time off to care for children and elderly relatives, face the prospect of working their entire lives only to end up in poverty when they retire (the UK gender-pension gap is currently 35%), all of which makes the fairytale of a knight in a shining Armani suit understandably appealing – as regressive as it is.
Would we be pining for someone to take care of us in a more favourable economic climate? Boynton isn’t sure, and, as she points out, the version of traditional family life we consume via social media is more like a branding exercise than a true representation of the lives the creators lead. ‘You know, the truth is that the most famous trad wives – Ballerina Farm, Nara Smith et cetera – aren’t traditional, stay-at-home mothers and wives; they work as content creators and brand managers. They’re incredibly astute image-makers who borrow the 1950s aesthetics and ideals and make them look lovely and appealing for social media.’
THE RISE OF SOBER PLAY
‘The first time I went to a sex party sober, I felt so anxious,’ says Lola, aka Miss Masochist, a London-based kink-content creator and founder of one of the capital’s only sober-play sex parties, Lucid. Though she’d been attending sex and kink parties for years, she had always ‘used alcohol to loosen me up a bit. I thought that alcohol made me fun and interesting, so it was a really confronting experience to be completely in the room and present.’ That night, she went home without ‘playing’ (having sex) with anyone.
Last year, the charity Drinkaware found that nearly a quarter of under-25s were teetotal, while the number of people expressing an interest in sobriety had gone up across the board. ‘In terms of sex and dating, I think the decline of drinking culture is driving a real shift in attitudes,’ says Boynton. ‘There was already a growing disappointment with disposable dating and hook-up culture; as more people embrace sobriety, there seems to be an even greater focus on meaningful connection. Basically, when you’re sober, you’re less likely to waste time dating someone who clearly isn’t right.’ Even within the sex-party space – where fleeting encounters are encouraged – sobriety lends an air of intention.
The idea for Lucid came after Lola attended a few more sex parties sober and found that ‘playing’ with intoxicated people didn’t feel right. ‘I would think back to all the times I’d been in their shoes and in the morning, I’d be wondering, “Did I really want to play [ie have sex] with that person?” Consent was given, but when you think about it the next day, you’re like, “Well, if I hadn’t been on certain substances, or if I wasn’t drinking alcohol, would that have happened?”
‘I also had friends and partners who were sober and who didn’t necessarily want to go into situations where they were exposed to people doing drugs or drinking, and I just thought, where can these people go? We started small, with a party for about 20 people, and have steadily grown since – we sold 100 tickets to our last social.’
Sex, she argues, confers its own kind of high. ‘People think maybe it won’t be as silly or as sexy, but actually, I’ve found that it’s the best it could possibly be.’ Echoing Boynton, she adds that sobriety allows her to be fully present, making the experience more meaningful, more consensual and – on a purely physical level – ‘you have way more sensation’.
CHEM COUPLES
At the opposite end of the scale, but still in search of deeper connection, is the growing movement of couples who get high to stay together.
One couple I know, a therapist and a research scientist, partake in an MDMA-assisted ‘relationship AGM’ once each year. Basically, they take MDMA, known for promoting feelings of openness, euphoria and empathy and lowering inhibitions, and set goals for themselves, as individuals and as a couple, as well as working through any ‘niggles’ in their relationship. The drug, my friend explained, takes the sting out of difficult conversations.
‘We take it very seriously. We set an agenda, which we always do while sober. Then we take the MDMA in quite a ceremonial way; we cleanse the space, we set an intention, either privately or together, then we lie down and listen to a guided meditation for 15 minutes. By that point, we’ve probably started feeling the effects of the MDMA. At first we don’t really talk, we just need to stretch and move, maybe we dance. We journal privately. Those first few hours are kind of fun, then we come together to talk.’
It’s not as wild as it might seem.
Drug-assisted couples’ therapy, using MDMA, as well as other psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, has been happening since the 1970s, and has seen a huge surge in popularity in the past 15 years as part of the renaissance in psychedelic research. Though official statistics are hard to come by (both psilocybin and MDMA are class-A drugs in the UK, and possession alone carries a potential seven- year prison sentence), anecdotally, the underground use of the drugs (particularly MDMA) by couples’ therapists certainly seems to be on the rise. Pioneered by the likes of New York-based psychotherapist and MDMA advocate Charley Wininger, drug-assisted couples’ therapy – which typically costs between £5-10,000 – purports to be more effective in getting people to open up, leading to bigger, more insightful breakthroughs.
In Australia, psilocybin and MDMA have been legalised as treatments for depression and PTSD respectively since 2023, but other countries have been slow to recognise their therapeutic potential. Meanwhile, psychedelic tourism has flourished in countries where some compounds of the drug aren’t illegal. From the Netherlands to Jamaica, retreats offering to improve your relationship via mushroom trips are now commonplace.
It certainly seems effective: ‘We discuss relationship timelines, marriage, having children, where we want to be in our careers,’ says my friend. ‘We also discuss money. I generally hate talking about money, but the MDMA helps put you in a headspace where these things don’t feel frightening. Everything feels like it’s coming from a place of love.’ These sessions tend to last a few hours, ‘although we always have to have a cut-off. Last time, we kept going as we felt there were unresolved issues, but after eight hours, we were tired, hungry and just ended up having an argument.’
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