Love Was Never the First Thing We Lost
Monday, August 3, 2026.
There is a question I've started asking folks.
Not only couples.
Friends.
Colleagues.
Sometimes complete strangers.
It isn't especially complicated.
Who notices when you don't show up?
The answers have become quieter over the years.
"My wife."
"My boss."
"My sister."
"My dog."
Occasionally, after an uncomfortable silence...
"No one, probably."
That answer stays with me.
Not because it is dramatic.
Because it has become increasingly ordinary.
For most of human history, disappearing was difficult.
Someone noticed your empty chair at church.
The woman behind the diner counter wondered why you hadn't come in.
A neighbor saw that your porch light never came on.
A coworker asked if you were feeling all right.
The barber wondered why you'd skipped your appointment.
Recognition wasn't intimacy.
It was simply life.
You lived among people who also expected to see you tomorrow.
We rarely thought about those tiny recognitions because they were everywhere.
Like oxygen.
You don't spend much time appreciating oxygen until there isn't enough of it.
I have begun to wonder whether loneliness has been misunderstood.
Perhaps we are not suffering first from a shortage of romance.
Perhaps we are suffering from a shortage of recognition.
That is a different problem.
And it may explain why romance has become so extraordinarily difficult.
The Romance Recession Is Telling Us Something
Faith Hill's beautiful new essay in The Atlantic explores what she calls "The Great Romance Slump."
Because young adults are dating less, marrying later, having less sex, and describing the search for love as emotionally exhausting rather than hopeful.
Her article explores familiar explanations—economics, technology, changing gender roles, remote work, and the relentless fatigue of modern courtship.
I think she's right.
I also think she's documenting something even larger than romance.
Romance is simply where the damage becomes impossible to ignore.
Love Was Once a Byproduct of Shared Life
When couples tell me how they met, they almost never describe a brilliant strategy.
They simply tell me a story about repetition.
"Our offices were across the hall."
"We kept ending up at the same family parties."
"Her brother was my roommate."
"Our kids played soccer together."
"We saw each other every Sunday for almost a year before we ever spoke."
Those stories have something important in common.
Nobody was trying especially hard to manufacture intimacy.
Life kept placing the same two people in front of one another.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Eventually they stopped feeling like strangers.
That is how human beings have fallen in love for thousands of years.
Not all at once.
Not because of perfect compatibility.
Because familiarity quietly became trust.
Trust became affection.
Affection became love.
Social science researchers have long understood that repeated, positive exposure changes how we experience other people.
The unfamiliar becomes familiar.
The unfamiliar becomes safe.
The safe becomes cherished.
Love rarely begins with fireworks.
It usually begins with recognition.
We Engineered Convenience. We Accidentally Eliminated Familiarity.
Modern life is astonishingly efficient.
My groceries arrive without conversation.
My banking happens without tellers.
My meetings happen without hallways.
I can stream movies without leaving the couch.
I can order dinner without speaking to another human being.
I can spend an entire weekend accomplishing dozens of tasks while barely being noticed by anyone.
From the perspective of convenience, this is extraordinary.
From the perspective of human psychology, the picture is more complicated.
Convenience quietly eliminated repetition.
Repetition created familiarity.
Familiarity created trust.
Trust made intimacy possible.
The cost of convenience was not merely fewer conversations.
It was fewer opportunities for strangers to become familiar enough that one day they no longer felt like strangers at all.
The Hidden Luxury of Being Expected
One of the quiet luxuries of earlier communities was not romance.
It was expectation.
Someone expected you to arrive.
Someone noticed when you didn't.
You belonged to enough overlapping circles that your absence created a small disturbance somewhere.
Today many folks can essentially disappear for days without interrupting anyone else's routine.
We have become wonderfully independent.
Sometimes frighteningly invisible.
Those are not the same thing.
Perhaps this helps explain why so many folks describe themselves as lonely despite having hundreds of contacts, followers, and acquaintances.
Connection is not the same as recognition.
Visibility is not the same as belonging.
Being looked at is not the same as being expected.
There is a quiet difference between being noticed and being known.
Social media can make us visible to thousands of people who would never realize we were gone.
Belonging works another way.
It isn't measured by how many other folks see you. It's measured by who would come looking if you disappeared for a while.
Why Dating Feels Like Work
One sentence from Hill's article has lingered in my mind.
A young woman describes modern dating as feeling like "a job interview."
Exactly.
Because we have quietly assigned dating a task it was never designed to perform.
The first date must now create what neighborhoods once created.
What churches once created.
What workplaces once created.
What extended families, bowling leagues, volunteer organizations, and front porches once created.
Trust.
Safety.
Shared history.
Shared friends.
Shared identity.
A believable future.
Preferably over two cocktails and an appetizer.
That is an impossible assignment.
The miracle isn't that so many first dates fail.
The miracle is that any of them succeed.
The Village Didn't Guarantee Love. It Made Love More Likely
Let's not romanticize the past.
The old village could be suffocating.
Cruel.
Gossipy.
Racist.
Sexist.
Homophobic.
Many folks fought hard to escape communities that denied their dignity.
They were right to do so.
But rejecting the old village does not eliminate the human need for belonging.
It simply leaves us with the challenge of building better ones.
Communities that are chosen rather than imposed.
Communities that welcome difference instead of punishing it.
Communities where people become familiar before they become lonely.
Because love has always been less about finding the perfect life partner than about inhabiting a world where partners have enough chances to become real to one another.
The Firepit
The image from Hill's article that stayed with me wasn't a dating app.
It wasn't a speed-dating event.
It wasn't a lonely subway ride home.
It was a group of single friends imagining tiny homes gathered around a shared firepit, cooking dinner together at the end of each day.
That isn't a consolation prize.
It's an ancient memory.
Long before we searched for soulmates, we gathered around fires.
The fire was never just about warmth.
It was about recognition.
The same faces.
The same stories.
The quiet certainty that someone would notice if you weren't there.
Perhaps that is what so many of us are really searching for.
Not just simply someone to love us.
Someone who actually would wonder where we’ve been.
Love wasn't the first thing we lost.
We lost the ordinary experience of belonging to one another.
Romance was simply the first place we finally noticed its absence.
Final thoughts
If this essay resonated with you, perhaps the question isn't simply whether you've found the right partner.
Perhaps it's whether your life contains enough places where you are known, expected, and genuinely recognized.
Healthy relationships rarely emerge from isolation.
They grow in lives that contain friendship, familiarity, community, and the quiet experience of being known.
If loneliness, relationship uncertainty, or the feeling that something essential has gone missing sounds familiar, science-based couples therapy can help you rebuild the foundations that make lasting connection possible.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.