What the Latest Dating Trends Get Wrong About Relationships

Odysseus crossed oceans, Paris started a war & King Edward VIII gave up being king for love. What did you do for your last relationship?

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These days, dating sounds less like an attempt to find true love and more like a cut-throat, multi-player game that requires both strategy and skill to level up and win a limited set of prizes that apparently everyone wants.

Legend has it that once upon a time, lovers crossed oceans, started wars, and renounced thrones to be with the someone they saw once across a room (and instantly became obsessed with). But now, people are more likely to squeeze two potential love interests 1.5 hours apart at the same drinking establishment on the same night of the week–an example of the strategy commonly known as stacking.

Stacking, throning, & banksying: A taxonomy of dating trends

If you think the practice of scheduling back-to-back dates in the name of time management is a rather unromantic approach to modern love, the internet is awash with alternative strategies to try on your quest. There’s throning, which involves using your partner to level up one way or another, whether it’s via their follower count, height, money, or looks. Even more brutal may be banksying , which involves driving your partner insane by slowly pulling away for no apparent reason before the relationship self-destructs (the way Bansky's street art famously did).

Despite their varied names and uniquely toxic methodologies, the one thing these latest dating trends have in common is that they all involve the implicit assumption that getting the desired ROI (return on investment) for your relationship involves manipulating the system–by either squeezing potential partners for all they’re worth or minimizing the effort you put in on your end. But even though the internet loves a good life hack or dupe, true love just might be the one thing left in the world that resists shortcuts–maybe for no other reason than the simple fact that they don’t seem to work very well.

Banksying just might be the most brutal dating strategy out there at the moment

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The psychology of happy couples

Here’s an open secret: psychologists don’t agree on everything. There are plenty of theories out there that have inspired more debate than confidence, but luckily for couples everywhere, the Investment Model of close relationships isn’t one of them. It’s been around for nearly a half century and recent studies continue to support its key premise: how much you invest in a relationship predicts how long it lasts, how committed you are, and how satisfied you are with your partner. Its originator–the late Carol Rusbult–also acknowledged that people want to maximize their rewards and minimize their costs when it comes to being with another person. But still, love is less of a black box and more of an equation where inputs equate outputs (even in a world dominated by claims of boy math vs. girl math).

Yet investments –be it in the form of effort, time, money, shared activities, or even helping mutual friends or family–are glaringly absent from most if not all of the strategies blowing up people’s FYPs. If anything, stacking and banksying involve the opposite of investing–instead, people are committing the minimum time possible for dates and withdrawing before the breakup in anticipation of the relationship not working out. Throning, meanwhile, focuses exclusively on what you get out of your partner and little on what you bring to the table.

Is true love optimization-resistant?

Here’s the thing: I’m sure there are corners of the universe where these types of dating strategies work. You might be able to save enormous chunks of time stacking your dates like Jenga blocks; you might even get to keep something from dating a queen or king or other royal member of one jurisdiction or another. But maybe, just maybe–if you believe the people who study this sort of thing for a living–your love life might be the one thing on your calendar that resists optimization and demands things the old-fashioned way: with time, effort, and if you’re lucky or blessed, a prolonged patience.