Cinemagoers tutted – but in Materialists, I finally saw a true reflection of today's dating market

The Guardian

2 days ago

On Sunday I took myself, with a slight hangover, to see a preview screening of Materialists, the long-awaited new film by Celine Song. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a matchmaker with a talent for pairing her exacting clients with someone who ticks most of their boxes and is also likely to accept them. She is less cupid, more market analyst – capable of seeing through her singletons' self-serving bluster and spin to appraise their actual worth – then matching it with someone of equivalent value.
A thirtysomething woman of only average good looks, for instance, can't hope to land a 'unicorn' – a 6ft-tall high earner with his original hairline. Unicorns want to date twentysomethings – and they can get them, too.
Lucy herself is jaded as a result of her job, and pragmatic, having grown up poor. Her last serious relationship – with John (Chris Evans), an aspiring theatre actor/cater waiter – ended after he admitted, just before their anniversary dinner, that he didn't have $25 to pay for parking.
Now Lucy is resolved to stay single or marry rich – preferably eye-poppingly rich. When she is wooed by Harry (Pedro Pascal) – one of those unicorns her clients seek – and returns home with him to his multimillion-dollar apartment, her head swivels round mid-embrace, totting up its approximate worth.
Obviously one matinee screening in Norwich doesn't count for much in terms of market research, but I got the impression – from the audible and repeated tuts, tsks and groans around me – that the (mostly older) audience was dismayed by these explicit conflations of romance with finance.
I kept quiet in my seat, uncomfortably conscious that I was finally watching a romcom that showed a version of dating and romance I recognised.
That it's Tough Out There for single people is a truth pretty much universally acknowledged, and widely blamed on dating apps. The technology – mainstream now for more than a decade – has become inextricable from the experience of dating; even if you don't use dating apps yourself, you can feel their influence in the normalisation of ghosting, for instance, or 'situationships' of convenience.
Materialists, written and directed by Song, was inspired by her own brief experience working as a matchmaker in New York. But Lucy's clients, with their checklists, seem to be an embodiment of the apps' consumerist logic. Your profile is essentially a billboard on which you display your most marketable self and specify the traits you seek (and won't accept) in others. Swiping is an instant, binary value judgment, appraising someone as being worthy (or not) of your attention. Your choices seem infinite. Meanwhile, access to the most in-demand – and therefore the most desirable, per the algorithm – matches is increasingly reserved for paying members.
It is at best a crude way of creating connection, and at worst explicitly capitalistic in a way that is at odds with attraction, commitment and intimacy. Now, as described by the sociologist Eva Illouz (notably in The End of Love), that hyper-rational, self-serving approach has escaped online dating to infiltrate all of modern love.
Years of swiping have primed people to expect to feel the same instant feedback that someone is right for them, before they commit to finding out. A relationship, meanwhile – a costly endeavour in a culture that prizes individualism, freedom and choice – must offer a return on investment.
You might not express this as baldly as Lucy or her clients, but it is in the air, the unspoken calculation behind many of our romantic decisions (and even our platonic ones: consider the brittle discussion of 'friendship breakups' and 'toxic friends'). Illouz terms it 'emotional capitalism', whereby 'emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange'.
What has really given teeth to this clinical number-crunching is wealth inequality, foregrounding the financial support of a partner – and incentivising some to find the richest one possible. The comparisons with the marriage market of Jane Austen's time aren't just qualitative, but backed by data. Stagnating salaries and rising costs mean that if you don't come from wealth yourself, the only way to improve your material circumstances – or just achieve financial security – is through a relationship.
A recent survey by the financial services provider OneFamily found that one in five young adults aged between 18 and 40 are choosing to live with a partner primarily to make living costs more affordable, 'because the bills are too high to contemplate managing on their own', as the OneFamily CEO put it. Even if you are in a happy, reciprocal relationship, you can't block out this influence altogether: do you love your partner, or do you love paying 50% less rent?
Though I am largely contentedly single, I'm uncomfortably conscious that as a self-employed person in a struggling industry, my best shot at improving my circumstances, or even changing my life, is finding a partner. This doesn't influence my decisions in dating – but I can't say that I don't fleetingly think, when I meet a nice doctor who owns a three-bedroom house in south London, that it would be especially nice if it worked out. (It didn't!)
It is naive to believe that we can separate romance and even relationships from financial reality. Against such a brutal backdrop, financial stability is arguably a sound reason to prioritise the search for love. If that strikes us as unsavoury or regressive, we should push for affordable housing and more financial and society safety nets, so that we can enter into relationships freely and set love apart, as best we can, from finances.
For now, the challenge faced by modern singles – as Materialists acknowledges – is striking a balance between pragmatism and idealism, and holding on to hope against, often brutal reality checks. 'Some people just want more' is the film's tagline. I can't begrudge anyone for dating for money more than for love, when the two are so entangled. But we might ultimately be better off pushing for more from society, rather than our partners.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
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