To the question ‘How did you meet your partner?’, more than half (53%) of the thousands of American heterosexual people who participated in research from Stanford University that collects data until 2022 answered: “online.” In Spain, no reference studies have yet been published that accurately measure the impact of technology on the way we establish romantic relationships. But all the demographers, anthropologists and other social scientists who have studied the transformation of marriage markets and mating dynamics in the last 25 years agree: “We are on that path.”
The graph illustrating the Stanford research shows the extent to which the Internet has devastated traditional ways of starting relationships. Neither the intermediaries (family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers) nor the meeting places (bars, nightclubs, schools and universities, the Church, recreational and summer resorts) are already conducive to finding love. Almost everything happens on dating apps and social media.
Technology not only determines how we know each other, but also how we relate to our loved ones. Couples and friends see each other less and less in person. It is a trend that is observed in all age groups, but especially in the youngest. “We have detected that today there are mainly three types of couples in terms of their behavior or way of relating,” explains Luis Ayuso, professor of Sociology at the University of Malaga and coordinator of one of the most detailed investigations on the new reality of couples in our country, ‘The management of intimacy in the digital society. Couples and breakups in today’s Spain’ (BBVA Foundation, 2022).
“On the one hand, digital couples, people who relate almost exclusively virtually. They communicate through video calls or social networks. They send each other photos of how they are dressed, explain how the day went, what they will have for dinner, what plans they have for the weekend…, all through screens. Face-to-face is reduced to a minimum or does not exist at all, but the emotional intensity of these relationships can still be very high. It is not predominant, but it is clearly on the rise,” warns Ayuso.
“There are also hybrid couples, who combine digital and real encounters, regardless of whether the first connection occurred online or in person. The most common thing is that the virtual has more weight than the face-to-face. They ask each other for their Instagram or WhatsApp account and through there they get to know each other. And from time to time they remain, but much less than before. We have seen, for example, that in Andalusia the bottle price has dropped a lot. Because? Because it wasn’t just a place to get drunk, but also to connect. And now they do that by mobile phone.” Meeting in person is an effort that has been left to the most traditional: “Lastly, most people over 40, who are often coming out of other relationships (separations, divorces or even people who have become widows) and they ‘match’ through a dating website, they continue to prefer the in-person culture, which is the type of intimacy they know,” says the sociologist.
On the Internet, the options for choosing a partner are potentially endless. We no longer have to look for the better half in our immediate environment. We can filter candidates by their physique, income, ideology and hobbies, which a priori should serve to form more stable ties. The paradox of this digital ecosystem applied to the matchmaking market is that it does not help us choose better, but quite the opposite: having so many options makes the choice difficult and generates too many expectations, dissatisfaction and doubts. Lots of doubts.
In the widely used concept of liquid love by the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, at the beginning of the century, the instability of relationships in the postmodern era was already anticipated, in contrast to the solidity and security that characterized human interactions in past times. But that no longer serves to explain the digital society. The dynamics of interpersonal relationships have gone from liquid to gaseous in just two decades. We are faced with what Francesc Torralba, professor of Philosophy at the Ramon Llull University, calls “the volatility of ties,” which gives rise to an inconsistency in relationships never seen before: “Today I am with you; Tomorrow, we’ll see,” summarizes the philosopher.
“Young people live in total uncertainty. They have a brutal crisis of confidence, a product of the insecurity typical of the digital world. They are technodependent. They establish disembodied relationships through their mobile phone, which is the center of gravity around which their entire universe of relationships orbits. They are only seen and heard, nothing more. The rest of the senses disappear. They don’t even know if the other person sweats or wears cologne. And all this happens in a fictional environment, where they can completely alter their image. They build a digital alter ego to be more attractive. They are fake versions of themselves,” reflects Torralba, who is also a doctor in Theology.
This emotional instability leads to a great fear of commitment: “Going from volatile to a solid bond gives them real terror. I only observe a certain attachment to their mothers,” says Torralba. Another student of the evolution of sexual relationships, anthropologist Jordi Roca (Rovira i Virgili University) points out that the dynamics of romantic relationships cannot be separated from the historical moment in which they develop: “We are in a consumer society. The era of having the same job, car and appliances for life is over. Now we change our cell phone every two years and our washing machine every little more. And love is not immune to all this. It also becomes obsolete, and that is why we change partners much more often.”
This thesis of Roca agrees with the idea of ??the commodification of love developed by the French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, one of the greatest theorists of contemporary love. In her extensive work, Illouz criticizes how capitalism has transformed love into just another consumer product that can be sought, consumed, and discarded like any other market good, giving rise to ephemeral relationships.
The sociologist Luis Ayuso also uses an economic term to illustrate one of the main obstacles to the formation of solid couples in the era of digitalization, especially among young people: the opportunity cost. “Before we controlled the matchmaking market: you knew the kids from the neighborhood, from school, the friends and acquaintances of our brothers, etc. Now it is a global hypermarket full of opportunities. This implies that by being with one person, we renounce all the others. And that creates anxiety. Even if you have met your prince charming, or a fantastic girl with whom you are deeply in love, you get home and think: what if I open the application and find a better one than this one, with which I can fall more in love? You have it just one click away!” explains Ayuso.
Once again, this is a matter of miscalculated expectations. “Many think they will find someone who will make their life great. But it’s subjective, it’s just in their heads. And most likely it is far from what they can really aspire to,” the researcher reasons.
This profound transformation of interpersonal relationships will have short-term social consequences. The logical consequence of the scarcity of stable couple projects is that many fewer children will be born. And here another factor comes into play for the lack of commitment of the new generations as nuclear as technology: the pessimism of young people regarding their future. Teresa Castro, demographer and CSIC researcher on the marriage market, believes that “economic barriers are more decisive than the digitalization of relationships. Difficulties in accessing housing and the labor market mean that Spain has, together with Italy, the highest average age of emancipation for young people (30 years). When there is no cohabitation, the relationship is more inconsistent. That is what delays the project of forming families.”
The incorporation of people from other cultures into our society hardly serves to balance the situation, although the evolution of mixed marriages in recent decades offers some clues: “The pattern of adult Spanish men who get together with foreign women is growing, mainly Latin America and Eastern Europe,” Castro observes.
A possible explanation, the consulted experts agree, is that the massive access of Spanish women to university and the job market has cracked the foundations of many couples: they no longer accept that they do not collaborate in the care of the children and the family. home, which causes many breakups. Some of these men re-pair with women with a lower level of education, who are more economically dependent and often come from more sexist societies, so their threshold for demanding co-responsibility is lower than that of their ex-partners.
More exhaustive studies on the impact of immigration on the Spanish marriage market, such as those carried out by Albert Esteve for the Center d’Estudis Demogràfics, conclude that demographic factors (the volume of immigrants of each nationality) are secondary in mixed marriages. Cultural preferences weigh much more, with no significant variations recorded between first and second marriages. For example, Spaniards mainly marry Brazilians, which is not one of the most present nationalities in our country. Something similar happens in the opposite case: Spanish women mostly choose husbands from Argentina, Eastern Europe and even countries in black Africa (Nigeria) or the Caribbean (Cuba). None of these communities is the majority in Spain, except Romania. On the other hand, there are fewer Spanish men and women who marry people from Morocco, the predominant nationality in Spain.