We Have More Options Than Ever, So Why Are We Lonelier?

For someone born in a medieval village, romance was not the enormous matter of choice it is today.

The people you could meet were, for the most part, limited.

A farmer from the next village, the blacksmith's son, someone from a family your parents knew. At most, twenty or thirty people, give or take. Within that circle, you met, grew attached, married, and lived out your life together.

Today it is completely different.

Turn on your smartphone and hundreds of millions of people appear on the screen. Through Instagram, dating apps, and all kinds of communities and social media, we can now reach more people than was conceivable in any earlier era. On the surface, this is an age in which our options have multiplied overwhelmingly.

And yet something is strange.

Even though we can connect with so many people, why do we grow lonely so much more easily?

Perhaps the problem began not with too few options, but with too many.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz left us with an important insight long ago.

As our options multiply, he argued, we do not become freer; we become more easily exhausted and less satisfied. The often-cited jam experiment points in the same direction. People lingered longer in front of a display with many varieties, but actually bought less. The smaller selection, by contrast, made the decision easier.

Romance reveals this problem in a far more extreme form.

In theory, this is an age in which we can connect with anyone on earth. But the number of people we can actually have serious conversations with, meet repeatedly, and build a relationship with is smaller than we think. Once you account for the time and energy you really have, physical distance, and the radius of your daily life, the people you can form deep relationships with remain limited.

In other words, the population has grown close to infinite, but **the sample with whom I can actually form a relationship has barely grown at all.**

And the problem does not end there.

The more options we have, the less we can see the relationship in front of us for what it is. Even when the person before me is perfectly good, a feeling creeps in that someone better must be out there. We put off the decision, we compare, and because certainty never arrives, we fail to hold on to the relationship. And so, strangely, the more people we see, the less able we become to choose anyone at all.

It is easy to assume that people in the past lived with whoever was near simply because they had no other options.

But turn it around, and perhaps that very limitation was the condition that allowed relationships to last.

There is an old contrast that runs through the way we talk about romance.

The cold, blunt type, and the warm, affectionate type.

Many people know from experience that the type they are drawn to while dating and the type they are comfortable actually living with over the long run can be different. The person who makes your heart race and the person who gives you a sense of security are not always one and the same.

Someone who shows little emotion and comes across as blunt can feel frustrating in the early stages of dating. They are clumsy at expressing themselves, and the ways they show affection are limited. But in some cases, that very limited energy ends up flowing deeply into a single relationship. The opposite type—kind to everyone, gifted with empathy—is enormously attractive at the start of a relationship. They are easy to be around, attentive in their care, and they make you feel emotionally connected. Over time, though, it sometimes becomes clear that this warmth was never directed at you alone. If they are kind at roughly the same temperature to their wife, their colleagues, their friends, and complete strangers alike, the other person may suddenly feel a kind of emptiness.

This affection wasn't given to me because I'm special—it was simply the kindness that person extends to the whole world.

Of course, people don't divide so neatly into two types. Real human beings are far more complicated. The point that matters, though, is that when we choose someone, we surprisingly often confuse the language of excitement with the language of endurance.

And on top of this comes the problem of attachment.

The relationship we formed with our parents in childhood is known to shape the patterns of our later intimate relationships for a long time. Someone used to bluntness may find themselves drawn again to a similar emotional distance, and someone who never learned to express emotion well may struggle with emotional communication even as an adult. No one did anything wrong on purpose, yet ways of relating get repeated across generations.

We often think of love as a present-tense emotion, but in reality we sometimes enter love as a way of meeting again the familiarity of our past.

The early stage of love is often closer to physiology than to judgment.

In the work of the anthropologist and researcher Helen Fisher, the brain in love enters a very peculiar state. Arousal-related neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine surge, the person becomes intensely absorbed in their partner, and may grow more optimistic and obsessive than usual.

Put simply, the first few months are something like a stretch of time when the brain is somewhat intoxicated.

That is why one of the important measures in a relationship turns out to be time.

Usually, after a few months, the initial idealization begins to lift, little by little. A habit that once looked cute becomes uncomfortable; a personality that once seemed cool starts to feel tiring. Only then does the real person come into view. How they react when they're angry, how mature they are when things don't go their way, what attitude they show when they're tired and worn down.

Early attraction can open the door to a relationship, but what makes you able to live together once the door is open is, in the end, "compatibility."

That is why some relationships burn briefly and intensely and then end just as fast. Once the initial absorption fades, nothing is left. Others, by contrast, grow strangely comfortable and solid even after the early fantasy has worn thin. Only then does a person come to know whether what they loved was an image, or this actual human being.

Time does not weaken emotion; it filters out the fantasy that had been mixed into it.

We often explain love through fate or compatibility of temperament, but real relationships are frequently built on far simpler conditions. And the most powerful of these, surprisingly, is **proximity**.

The reason we grow attached to the people we see often can't be explained by sentiment alone. Through repeated contact, humans create familiarity, and through familiarity they form trust. The more time we spend together, the more the other person becomes a part of my life. When physical distance grows, by contrast, holding the relationship together takes far more will and effort, no matter how good the feelings once were.

Long-distance relationships are hard not only because people's hearts are weak.

When you can't meet often, when contact dwindles, when you can't accumulate the small everyday moments together, the relationship gradually becomes abstract. Love is hard to replace entirely with messages and video calls. Conversely, even someone you felt nothing for at first can, through repeated meetings in the same space and a shared daily life, become a special presence at some point.

A coworker, the staff member at the cafe you visit often, someone you keep running into in the same neighborhood.

Many of the scenes where a spark begins come not from some grand event but from **repeated proximity**.

In many cases, love didn't come first; love followed because the two people were close by.

Everyone has, at least once, witnessed a strange relationship.

On the surface the relationship is already over, yet one side simply cannot leave. Knowing they are being hurt, they keep holding on, and even when the people around them try to stop them, they go back.

Three things, usually, are what make people cling to such a relationship.

The attachment built up over a long time together, the illusory sense of security that familiarity provides, and the most dangerous belief of all: **the expectation that I can change this person.**

But people, for the most part, are not easily changed by others.

This is all the more true of someone who disappoints you over and over within the relationship. And the reason many people still can't leave is that letting go of the relationship feels like failure, as though all the time they endured up to now would be wasted.

So breaking up is often not a matter of technique.

It lies on a deeper level than what to say, and how, in order to end things cleanly. What matters more is whether I believe I deserve to be treated well, or whether I think this much is simply something I have to put up with.

When self-esteem is low, even the worst relationship is hard to cut off.

Because familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar peace.

By contrast, a person with clear boundaries withdraws relatively quickly from a relationship that is breaking them down, even if some affection remains.

The strength to leave doesn't come from coldness.

Usually it comes from **a sense that I will not carelessly lose myself.**

Set against the long history of modern humans, the standards we now consider essential to romance are quite recent. The detailed criteria for an ideal type, emotional sophistication, a partnership that supports each other's growth, perfect communication skills. Across the whole of human history, these are concepts attached very late.

For most of humanity's time, life was much simpler.

Eating, sleeping, holding the group together, raising children, surviving until tomorrow. Relationships, too, took shape within that frame. Far more important than the ability to find a perfectly matched person was **the ability to live life through alongside the person next to you.**

Because they were physically close, attachment grew,

the time of enduring the initial strangeness passed,

and the time they endured together made the relationship.

Looking back, it doesn't seem that what kept humanity going was always some grand romance. Rather, the larger role was probably played by the time spent staying beside someone without any great certainty, the daily life of remaining together despite imperfection, and the bond that grew out of it.

So perhaps it could be put this way.

It wasn't love that kept humanity alive.

**It was simply the time spent being near one another that kept humanity alive.**

We live in an age that tries to interpret relationships far too elaborately.

We analyze the other person's psychology, sort them into types, read the signals, calculate the odds. Of course, that kind of understanding isn't entirely useless. But in many cases, what decides a relationship is something more fundamental and simple.

Is this person not the worst?

Does being with them keep wearing my heart down?

Even as time passes, is it still comfortable?

Are the conditions there for us to be close?

After the fantasy lifts, is there something that remains?

In the end, what matters comes down to a few things.

If the relationship is the worst, cut it off without regret.

If it isn't, stay close and try to endure through the time.

And at least until the early intoxication wears off, don't be hasty in idealizing the other person.

Having more options does not necessarily make us happier.

Whether in a medieval village or the age of Instagram, the number of relationships any one person can truly meet and hold on to is limited. The difference lies less in the size of the population than in whether you can stay put in front of a given relationship.

Humans were simpler beings than we think.

And probably, even now, that hasn't entirely changed.

The reason we are lonelier is not that there are too few people to love,

but perhaps that, faced with too many possibilities, we cannot actually stay long beside any one person.

What kept people together over time was not the strong first feeling, but the attachment that accumulated from staying beside each other for a long while.

We think of love as something to 'find,'

but the love that actually lasts is, for the most part, closer to something that 'accumulates.'

The flutter of excitement may be a beginning.

But what holds a relationship together to the end is attachment.

The problem is that modern people believe only the emotion of the beginning is love.

And so they leave before the relationship can deepen, and set out to find someone better.

As a result, our options have multiplied,

yet people may have ended up experiencing greater loneliness rather than deeper relationships.