How people are rethinking happily ever after

Finding a love match is one challenge. Then there’s happily ever after. Since 2009, Meredith Goldstein has been giving daily advice to Bostonians and beyond about dating, love and relationships through her “Love Letters” column. Her column has spawned a popular podcast now in its seventh season, as well as an active community who share their takes on the letters and Goldstein’s responses. She also has written a deeply personal memoir. Over time, she’s seen a host of attitude shifts about courting, commitment and singlehood.

Kate MacArthur: How have the letters that people write to you evolved since your column began?

Meredith Goldstein: I’ll be in the 14th year of the column and privacy is still an issue. But there are a lot less letters coming in about snooping and about needing to break into a partner’s email account or Facebook account. Instead, what I am seeing more than any other letter is dating fatigue, an absolute high level of exhaustion and misery with the monotonous way we date. Now, people are always asking me, “Is the internet good or bad for love?” And the truth is all the above. If you’re not swiping, you can feel like you’re missing out on somebody important, which means you can do it forever, and it feels like a job.

MacArthur: Back in history, relationships were contractual, where people married for money, property or connections, and marrying for love was this unattainable thing. Is there an under-analyzed trend about how we seek and engage in love?

Goldstein: There’s a whole set of people, even in my life, that don’t truly believe that this whole thing was built on that contract. You can point to different times in history, but at some point, love became the necessity.

It sets up a lot of confusion, because in straight relationships, you have more women working, supporting themselves, finding alternative ways of living with partners, and that might be having roommates for longer. You don’t need to get married. It’s like, “I’m not going to [marry] unless it's additive, and it's about being madly in love.” Yet we're going to use the old [property] model for the contract in some ways, even though it's been adapted for divorce and the power of women.

When you talk about companies and all the services we use, sometimes I feel like they forget what’s happening, where they are selling coupledom. Yet that’s not what most people are experiencing. More people than ever are living alone.

MacArthur: Is there a place for marriage in the future, and if so, what is it?

Goldstein: I do think there’s a place for it. It’s just we didn’t acknowledge along the way how wildly different the meanings can be and how it’s changed. Some couples I know are finding different moments. It might be buying property together, having a nice dinner after. It might be specific financial investments and marking “Here are the ways we’re combining our lives.”

MacArthur: If love isn’t for pair bonding to procreate and survive, what’s it for?

Goldstein: There is something chemical and emotional and wonderful to it. And there is something to it where occasionally two people find each other, and they love partnering for life and that can happen. But I don’t think it has to happen. We see people have a partner for part of their lives, and then a different partner or maybe no partner for a while. We love a chosen family, we love “Golden Girls,” we love all these models. Yet I don’t think we’re at a place where there is real permission to consider that an ideal.

MacArthur: It’s one thing to marry for love, and our origins were marrying for a contract. So, what’s the harm in getting married for insurance or money today?

Goldstein: The fact that some people have to [marry] for health insurance is very unromantic to me. One thing that’s interesting is during 2020, Somerville, Massachusetts, became the first town to allow for polyamorous relationships on the books. Somerville has a high number of polyamorous units. When lockdown was still happening, there was some concern that a second person wouldn’t be able to go to the hospital. The city council quickly passed an ordinance that you could be domestic partners with more than one person. It was really radical. I’ve never understood why I can’t insure a sibling or insure loved ones. Why does it have to be somebody we love romantically? It’s just an odd thing that we’ve tied these things together.

MacArthur: What are the signals that you’re getting about what modern love will look like in the future?

Goldstein: There will always be traditional pairings, and there will always be, as long as I’m alive, marriages that look like 1990s rom-coms. But we’re heading to a place where it’s more fluid, where there will be a phase of life where a relationship will take you so far, and then it looks different. My question is, as the wealth gap changes and as our relationship with the workplace changes, and we are hopefully less tethered, how do those changes affect what we’re seeking from a romantic partner?